


the flesh calmly going cold

by kindclaws



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Friends With Benefits, No Grounders, au where jroth didn't retcon the existence of cryo pods and Becca gave a bunch to the ark, season 1 AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:37:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24880150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: Clarke’s first coherent thought is that she must be dead, becausesunlight.It’s only the rapid beeping of the cryo pod’s life support systems that tells her that her vitals are still going strong, that she’s alive, that somehow, this isn’t a dream. The light and the birdsong and the forest creeping in through the hole in the Skybox are all, impossibly, real.The last thing she remembers is the guards pushing her down into the cryo pod, and Wells in the pod next to her, telling her not to fight, telling her it would be all right. But the Ark was supposed to wake them up after the oxygen problem was fixed. Theyweren’tsupposed to wake up alone on Earth with the Skybox ripped in half.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 54
Kudos: 185





	1. like the slumber that creeps to me

**Author's Note:**

> **CONTENT WARNINGS:** canon-typical violence including attempted strangling. Minor character death - a few characters who are dead in canon. Also, there's a lot of characters who don't appear, whose fate is ambiguous and you're free to choose where and how you think they are. There's also some minor body horror and just like, general... spookiness? But also a lot of happy moments and an overall hopeful ending. :)
> 
>  **PERMISSIONS:** I can't stop you from downloading and saving this fic locally, but I'd rather you didn't. I make frequent revisions, and if I ever decide I hate it I'll orphan rather than deleting it. I'm open to translations and podfics, but please contact me on tumblr first. Do not upload to other sites. Do not claim as your own. I did not consent to the upload of my fic to apps like Pocket Archive.
> 
> Titles from Hozier's In A Week, which is a deeply underrated song that perfectly walks the line between sweet and unsettling as fuck, which is what I was aiming for with this fic :P

#

Clarke wakes mid-sob, her last tears turned to thin trails of ice down the sides of her face. She is so, so cold, and so angry, and it takes her a moment to remember why as her ragged breathing echoes in her ears. She slams her fists against the glass lid of the cryo pod, only a few centimetres away from her face, until the latch clicks and it lifts with a hiss of air. Her ribcage squeezes painfully with each gasping sob as she shoves the lid up the rest of the way, wincing as the hinges shriek and strain. Clarke sits upright in a cloud of swirling fog as the cold air of her cryo pod escapes. Her teeth chatter painfully as she closes her eyes and forces herself to take deep breaths, willing herself to stop shuddering. The world behind her eyelids is so bright.

Too bright. She opens her eyes, and sees sunlight for the first time. 

Her breath stills in her lungs as she forgets how to breathe, and that of all things is what finally stops her sobs. Her first coherent thought is that she must be dead, because - _sunlight_. She’s never seen it before, not like this. It’s only the rapid beeping of the pod’s life support systems that tells her that her vitals are still going strong, that she’s alive, somehow, that this isn’t a dream.

The last thing she remembers is the guards pushing her down into the cryo pod, her mother looking down at her through the gap between their shoulders. Putting the delinquents to sleep to make more time for the rest of the Ark to fix the oxygen systems. 

When she went under, the Skybox’s main hall had four walls. Now there’s a gaping hole just a few pods away where it looks like the Skybox broke in two, and a forest has been slowly creeping in through the hole. All the pods near her are covered in moss and there are trees growing through the holes in the floor where the metal support struts have twisted and rusted out of shape. And the _light_ filtering in through the leaves, golden and dappled where it hits the mossy floor, oh, it’s more beautiful than anything she could have imagined. Over the shrill beep of her heart monitor signaling her elevated pulse, Clarke hears… chirping, and cranes her neck to follow the path of a winged shadow that soars in through the gap and vanishes into a crack in the ceiling where the fluorescent lights have gone dark and shattered. The chirping gets louder, fervent, and a moment later the bird flies back out into the sunlight. Clarke stares after it, only to be distracted by a buzz near her ear. She raises her hand and laughs in wonder as a bumblebee lazily twirls out of her reach.

“Earth,” she murmurs to herself. “This must be Earth.”

She finally pulls the clamp off her finger and clambers out of the cryo pod to shut off its shrieking about her missing pulse. The screen flashes a low power warning at her when she tries accessing her records. _Must be why I woke up_ , Clarke thinks. But then, raising her head and looking out over the rows and rows of silent cryo pods, she wonders why it’s just her. 

She looks to the left. It feels like just moments ago her mother was putting her under, and Wells was in the cryo pod next to her, telling her not to fight, telling her it would be all right. But the Ark was supposed to wake them up after the oxygen problem was fixed. They weren’t supposed to wake up on Earth with the Skybox ripped in half. 

“Something went wrong,” Clarke says to herself, as the beauty of the invading forest finally loses its luster. The floor beneath her is slick with moss and damp earth, and the Skybox is tilted slightly, the floor sloping down towards the hole, where the hull has been torn away and the support struts stick out into open air like bones picked clean. There are cryo pods scattered on the ground where the floor gave way, nearly invisible underneath the ferns and the moss that has reclaimed them. Clarke sees shattered glass lids and feels a wave of horror come over her. Her pod is only a few rows away from the Skybox’s ragged edge. That could have been her in the earth, doomed on impact, rotting before she could wake.

Clarke pushes the horror down and makes her way to Wells’ pod. The screen at his feet remains dark and silent even after she pokes at it, and her stomach begins to churn. _No_ , she whispers. The lid of his pod is even mossier than hers, and she rushes to the other end to claw it off, gathering dirt under her fingernails as she clears a window over his face. 

A grinning skull looks out at her, and Clarke lets out a strangled cry. She doesn’t want to believe that it’s him, wants someone else to have been sacrificed in his place, but she remembers him in the pod next to her, using his last moments to try to talk to her as she shrieked for him to shut up. _Fuck_ , what happened? What could have gone so wrong that she’d wake up alone on Earth after enough years for Wells’ body to rot away next to hers, for the forest to start growing over the Skybox’s remains? How much time has passed? Why didn’t the Ark come for them? She curls up at the foot of his cryo pod and makes herself small for a while, crying in anger and fear and guilt. Why didn’t Wells wake up? Why didn’t she tell him, before they went under, that she forgave him for getting them arrested? 

When night falls, the forest that seemed so beautiful in the sunlight becomes increasingly frightening. The hum of insects and life gets louder instead of quieting, and Clarke thinks suddenly of the predators she sketched in the margins of her Earth Skills notes while Wells listened to Mr. Pike. She retreats back into her cryo pod for the illusion of safety, propping the lid open with a branch so she won’t be frozen against her will again, but she doesn’t sleep a wink that first night. Every time she closes her eyes she sees that grinning skull and wonders how many others are hiding in the pods around her. How close she came to dying herself. 

In the morning Clarke slips out of her pod and walks up and down the rows, counting the number of screens that don’t report any malfunctions when she taps on them. She trails her fingers over names she recognizes but shies away from scraping the moss of any other pods, just in case. At the back of the hall the forest’s slow reclamation isn’t quite so prominent, and some of the glass remains clear. Clear enough for her to make out a few sleeping bodies. Not skeletons. Fifty-six. Fifty-six remaining active cryopods, where there should have been at least a hundred. They haven’t even woken and already nearly half of them are dead or vanished with the other half of the Skybox.

The temptation to wake someone else - to not be alone anymore - is overwhelming and ever present, but her stomach is already growling, her throat already dry. When the others wake, they’ll want food and water and answers too, and she has none to spare yet.

Then there will be the question of _who_ to wake. 

There’s a man in one of the pods. Clarke can’t call him a boy, not when he’s clearly older than eighteen. She’d know he wasn’t one of the delinquents even if he weren’t wearing a thigh holster with a gun in it. The Ark doesn’t arm prisoners. She sits by his pod for a while, scrutinizing his frozen and unreadable face. The mystery of his presence here is unnerving enough without the gun. But she remembers last night’s fear. She won’t be left powerless again. 

After some internal debate, she keys in the command to start his pod’s thawing cycle. It’ll take roughly 6 hours for him to be brought back to a healthy temperature and regain brain and organ function. Clarke doesn’t intend to let him wake up, but she can’t open the lid too early, either, or he’ll get permanent tissue damage. She estimates she has a few hours to decide what to do next before she’ll have to sit and monitor his vitals for the perfect time to grab the gun, so she gathers her courage and ventures to the Skybox’s edge, where the floor breaks away. The drop is only two or three meters or so, but she’s wary of the rust under the moss, of how she’ll climb back up. A quick survey of the Skybox solves that - the cover on the fire suppression is broken and she uses a sharp piece of debris to saw away at the hose until she’s fashioned herself a rope. 

The ground, when she finally reaches it, is soft and springy under her feet, like no metal floor has ever been. Clarke’s first few steps are unsteady as she gets used to sinking in the damp soil. She feels like a toddler, her hands outstretched for balance, her eyes wide open with wonder as she takes in the world for the first time. She never imagined there would be so much _green_. Earth Skills could never have taught her how the warmth of a shaft of sunlight through the foliage would feel on her skin. How the rainwater gathered in the valley of a broad leaf would taste on her dry tongue. Nothing looks quite how it did in her textbook, but she finds a tree with dark, spiny wood with what she thinks are apples. She eats in the shadow of the trunk, the sweet-sour juice running down her chin, and cries again when she remembers Wells will never taste this. 

That’s all Earth seems to be so far. Tears and wonder in equal measure.

At last she manages to control her sobs and uses her shirt to tie a sling that she fills with as many apples as she can carry back to the Skybox. The sun has reached the height of the sky by then, and even under the shade afforded by the trees the air is hot and muggy. Climbing back up the hose-rope leaves her skin slick with sweat and she rests on one of the less mossy cryo pods for a few minutes, letting the cold seeping through the thick glass cool her down. 

By then the progress meter on the man’s cryo pod says 90%. The apples are a good start, but she’ll need to find protein and carbs before she’s willing to wake the others, and for that - she needs the gun. Clarke waits until his brain activity says he’s dreaming, chewing on her thumb. _Fuck it_ , she declares. She opens the pod and takes a deep breath as mist pours out from between the cracks. And then there he is; shivering in his sleep like she did, frost gathered on his eyelashes. Clarke lets herself wonder what he’s dreaming about for only a moment before she slips the gun out of its holster and checks the cartridge. Only one bullet missing. Good. She’ll need all the help she can get. She hesitates a second before resolving to take the holster too. She’s unbuckling the straps around his thigh when the hand grabs her wrist. 

Screaming seems like the reasonable reaction when a body she thought was unconscious grabs her like that. Clarke’s fear melts to irritation just a second later when she sees the man raise his eyebrow in judgment. 

“The hell do you think you’re doing?” he rasps, his voice rough from disuse. 

“I just need your gun,” Clarke says, wrenching her wrist out of his grip, but he’s already sitting up, and she can pinpoint the moment he sees the forest growing in through the cracks. 

“We made it,” he whispers, and then he practically falls out of his pod in his hurry to climb out. “Where is she?” he demands, whirling between pods. 

“What do you mean, _we made it_?” Clarke demands, grabbing at empty air in his wake. “Hold on, what did you mean?”

“I need to find my sister,” he says, ignoring her completely, and suddenly it clicks for Clarke. They found the girl under the floor only days before she was put into isolation, she remembers the uproar, the rumours.

“…Olivia, right?” Clarke asks.

“ _Octavia_ ,” he snaps without looking at her, and Clarke already knows she hasn’t seen that name on any of the active screens. Her heart falls into her stomach as she watches the man tear down the aisles.

“I think some of the pods malfunctioned,” Clarke says, her voice quiet enough that she thinks he might not hear her, but then he’s already reached the edge of the Skybox where the torn metal gives way to forest. The man ignores her hose-rope and jumps the gap to the ground, rolling on impact and scrambling to rip away the ferns covering the shattered cryo pods on the ground. “You don’t want to look,” Clarke tries to tell him. 

When he sees the skeletons behind the glass, he reels back. The look he gives her is so anguished, so horrified, that Clarke drops her gaze, feeling like an intruder on his grief. She’s beginning to feel that it was almost a mercy that she was alone when she found Wells’ body. 

“I don’t understand,” he says weakly. Then he gasps. Twigs snap as he lurches to his feet once again. “Where’s the other half of the Skybox?” he asks, and then he’s tearing into the forest at top speed without waiting for an answer. 

“Hey!” Clarke yells. “Wait!” She scrambles down the hose-rope and into the bushes where he vanished as quickly as he can. He’s already far enough that she can’t see him through the thick forest, but she follows the sound of his voice. He’s screaming a name, over and over. 

_Just my luck_ , Clarke thinks. _I woke up the most impulsive person in the Skybox_. Even if she’d managed to get the gun off of him, it wouldn’t have been worth this… this _headache_. 

She doesn’t know how long she follows her companion into the forest. Long enough that she’s afraid she won’t be able to find the way back to the Skybox, that the only option is to keep following him. Long enough that her breath catches in her lungs, that her intercoastals are seizing by the time she catches up to him.

“ _Please_ stop yelling,” she pants. “We have no idea what’s in these woods. We could attract a - a _bear_ or something.”

“I don’t give a damn about that!” he roars, turning on her with such venom in his voice that Clarke takes a step back. “Half of the Skybox _vanished_ into thin air, princess, you’re not wondering where the hell it fell?”

“I don’t even know how we got to Earth!” she yells back, half-hysterical. He has the decency to flinch, just a little, and for a moment they just stare at each other. Slowly, suspiciously, birdsong returns to the treetops overhead. 

“Engineering couldn’t fix the oxygen,” the man says, his voice pained. Clarke doesn’t want to believe her. Her dad - he _promised_. He promised he’d find a way. “We were all going to die. Our only chance was to try to come down, but there weren’t enough exodus ships - “ he breaks off, dragging his hand down the side of his face. The day’s warmth and humidity is making a tangled mess of his curls. “So they brought down the whole Ark.”

“We must have broken apart in atmosphere,” Clarke murmurs. “Otherwise someone would have come to wake us - “

“How long does it take a body to rot?” he interrupts. “How long does it take a forest to grow over a wreck?”

“I don’t know,” Clarke says in a small voice. “I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

“What the hell was your plan, huh?” the man snarls. “Why are you the only one awake? Going to let the rest of us die in our pods?”

“What am I supposed to wake them up to?” Clarke retorts. “No food, no water, no shelter - “

“And you were going to solve that on your own, were you?” he asks sarcastically. 

“Have you got a better idea?”

“Yeah,” he says over his shoulder, stalking back in the direction they came from. “I’m going to wake up the smartest person I know.”

Her name is Raven Reyes, and both Clarke and her companion breathe a sigh of relief when they get back to the Skybox and there’s a face underneath the moss of her cryo pod. That’s one of the 56 active pods down. 

“You were in cryosleep for three months when the Council decided to scuttle the Ark,” the man says quietly, watching Raven’s sleeping, frost-rimmed face. “Raven and I, we both had people we didn’t want to be separated from, time we’d already lost. So she sneaked us in. We thought the pods were the safest place to be in during descent.” He glances sideways at Clarke, his jaw set in determination. “If anyone can figure out what went wrong, it’s her.”

Clarke nods stiffly and starts the thawing process. The man remains at Raven’s side even when Clarke tells him it’ll be hours before she wakes, and it makes Clarke’s stomach twist painfully. The only person who’s ever been so loyal with her is Wells, and she lost the last of the time she had with him to her own anger. 

The waiting makes her eyelids grow heavier and heavier, and she remembers that she didn’t get any sleep last night. Something about it still terrifies her - lying down and trusting the world won’t be upside down again when she wakes - but she glances over at the man and thinks that she’ll need the rest eventually. She’s not alone anymore, for better or for worse. Maybe it will be enough to make her feel safe. She lies down at the back of the Skybox where there’s less damp moss to seep into her clothes and tries to relax. The floor is cold and hard underneath her side, but she’d rather wake up sore than crawl back into her cryo pod.

She doesn’t realize she was shivering until the jacket is unceremoniously dumped over her torso. By the time she’s rolled over the man has already walked back to Raven’s pod, his shoulders hunched, face hidden. Clarke pulls the jacket tighter around her and swallows. 

“Thank you…” she says.

“Bellamy,” he says, filling the gap.

“Bellamy,” Clarke mouths to herself. It sounds vaguely familiar in the way that everyone in the Ark is vaguely familiar when the entire human race is a few thousand people, but she doesn’t think they’ve ever crossed paths before. “My name is - “

“I know who you are,” he interrupts, still not looking at her. Clarke rolls over with a huff and lets the exhaustion claim her. 

She’s woken roughly, Bellamy’s hands on her shoulders shaking her. The light coming in through the Skybox’s hole is peach-pink, and his eyes are wide with panic. 

“Please, I don’t know what to do - “ he says, and he drags her to Raven’s pod with clammy hands. The screen is flashing half a dozen errors, telling her the power is low, her temperature is rising too fast, her body rushing back to life. “What do we do?”

“I - I’m not sure,” Clarke stammers. Cryogenics was still a new field when the world ended, and as far as Clarke knows the Ark only resorted to it a few times in its history. She tries to babble something about the long-term effects being unknown to Bellamy, but he squeezes her hand painfully enough that it cuts through her own fear like a knife. 

“Do _something_ ,” he says, and the countdown says there’s still an hour to go, but Clarke cannot stand here and watch Raven die without giving her a chance. 

She opens the pod. 

The rush of cold mist, the anticipation - it’s starting to get familiar. They both lean over Raven’s thawed body, breathless and afraid. When she opens her eyes just a moment later, Clarke wants to cry in relief.

“Do you remember your name?” Bellamy asks her. 

“It’s cryo sleep, not a concussion,” Clarke snaps at him. 

“Raven,” Raven says hoarsely. 

“What’s 7 times 7?” Bellamy asks. 

“49,” she replies, looking vaguely disgusted. “If you’re testing my mental capabilities, at least ask me, I don’t know, trigonometry.”

Bellamy is silent for a beat. 

“I slept through trigonometry,” he admits and hastily moves on. “I’m glad you’re okay. When your pod started malfunctioning, I thought - “ he breaks off and shakes his head. “But you’re okay.”

Raven licks her lips nervously, glances at Clarke. “I’ve never done this before,” she says. “Am I supposed to have feeling in my legs yet?” And Clarke feels a cold trickle of dread. 

“Yes,” she says, rolling up her sleeves. “You can’t feel this?” she asks, tapping on the nearest knee. 

“No, the other one,” Raven says with a grimace, struggling to sit up with her elbows and groaning at the soreness of her body. Her face is wary as Clarke reaches over and taps on her other leg. She shakes her head. “I can’t feel that. Is my leg still fucking frozen? How long does this last?”

Clarke ignores Bellamy’s quiet swear and moves around the open cryo pod to Raven’s feet. “Can I take off your boot and take a look?” 

“You may as well,” Raven says. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Sure,” Clarke lies, unlacing Raven’s boot and easing it off her limp foot. To her relief the bare skin is the same warm bronze colour as the rest of Raven’s skin, and if the flush when Clarke squeezes each of her toes is any indication, her blood circulation is fine. It’s just… 

“I can’t feel any of that,” Raven says, letting herself fall back against the cryo pod’s pad with a groan of frustration. “Dammit, this _better_ be temporary.”

Clarke doesn’t say anything, just steps back and lets Bellamy break the news of their situation to Raven. They each brace one of Raven’s arms over their shoulders and hobble together, first to a pod labeled Finn Collins where Raven stares hard at the boy sleeping within, and then to the edge of the Skybox, letting her take in the twisted metal seam where the Skybox was torn apart, the forest that has grown in to greet them. The light filtering down through the trees is a deep red-orange now, both beautiful and frightening. 

Raven doesn’t say anything for a long time.

Then: “The Skybox has an array of solar panels on its outer hull. Must have been what kept our pods powered all this time. You two go check on them, see what’s started going wrong. I’m going to read through the environmental logs.”

“Will you be able to tell where the other parts of the Ark landed?” Bellamy asks urgently. 

“If I had the exact path it took down, the stages it broke at and exact calculations of each piece’s mass and velocity, _maybe_ ,” Raven says sarcastically. “But I don’t, so lower your damn expectations. We’ll start with what we can solve right now.”

“Easy for you to say,” Bellamy says. “Your family is here, safe.”

The glare Raven levels him with would put the fear of God in most reasonable people. 

Clarke is quickly learning that Bellamy is not most reasonable people.

“ _Don’t_ start,” she says, grabbing Bellamy’s arm and raising an eyebrow at him. 

After some more grumbling they get Raven settled in near the environmental terminal with Bellamy’s jacket to sit on and a few apples to snack on, and then she and Bellamy chip off the rust around a maintenance door Raven points out to them. When they finally pry it open, the air inside tastes stale and dry. The ladder spirals up into absolute darkness. Clarke tiptoes just behind Bellamy, casting nervous glances at the darkness so thick it feels enveloping, and resists the urge to ask to hold his hand. 

The outer hatch of the airlock at the end of the maintenance shaft takes some shoving too, but eventually they wrench it open and red-orange light pours in. Clarke raises her arm to block some of it and squints up at the sky as Bellamy heaves himself up and then reaches back for her. 

“Damn, that’s beautiful,” Bellamy murmurs, pausing to gaze at the sunset just visible through the trees. The rays stretch out over a distant mountain range like the fingers of a splayed hand searching for something to hold onto. 

Clarke has had a day longer than Bellamy has to take in Earth’s beauty, and she remembers how quickly it got dark last time. She shoulders past him deliberately. From their vantage point on top of the Skybox, she has a better view of the twisted struts where it was torn away from the other stations upon re-entry, of the crater their impact caused, leaving them half-buried and jutting out at an angle. Some of the solar panels Raven was talking about are completely shattered, and still others are covered in grime and fallen leaves from the tree branches overhead. 

She can almost picture it - the Skybox, blazing through the sky like a shooting star, scattering cryo pods as it tore apart. Trees splintering under the impact. Maybe it was quick. Maybe the forest burned while they kept slumbering peacefully inside. Over time the forest must have started growing back to fill in the gap they left in the canopy, and more and more leaves fell on the solar panels, adding up until the low power triggered a line of code in Clarke’s cryo pod and woke her up. 

She wants to cry again at the unfairness of it, the handful of feet separating her pod from Wells’, the line the universe apparently decided to draw between who got to live and who got to die. 

She and Bellamy clean some of the debris in silence, throwing broken branches off the side of the Skybox and scrubbing at a few of the intact panels with their sleeves until they can see the blue glass underneath the layers of dirt. The sky melts from orange to purple and to a deep, deep blue that begins to look familiar, the sky they always saw at the edge of the atmosphere from the Ark’s windows. 

“That’s enough for tonight,” Bellamy says at last. “It won’t make a difference what else we clean with the sun down.”

Clarke looks back over her shoulder at the edge of the maintenance hatch and grabs Bellamy’s arm. 

“Wait,” she says. “ _Look_.”

She doesn’t dare to breath as the first flickers of yellow-green light float out of the trees, and she doesn’t think Bellamy does, either. He holds his hand out and a moment later one of the sparks lands on his outstretched palm. 

“Its feet tickle,” he murmurs, and lowers his hand so she can see the firefly meandering along his heart line. “You take it,” and he tries to coax it into her hands instead before it flies off in a loop. They watch it go in silence before Bellamy shakes his head like he’s waking from a daydream and climbs down the hatch. 

Inside the Skybox, Raven is sitting where they left her, tears streaming down her face. 

“Are you hurt?” Bellamy demands, hurrying forward to kneel at her side. Raven looks like she barely registers his presence, her eyes staring into empty space. 

“Raven?” Clarke asks softly, sitting on her other side. She was afraid this would happen - if it’s not the muscles in Raven’s leg that were damaged in the thawing process, then it must be the nerves, and Clarke doesn’t think that’s just going to come back after a while. 

But when Raven finally speaks, it’s not about her leg at all. 

“It’s been twenty seven years,” she says roughly, hanging her head. “We’ve been asleep for _twenty seven years._ ” 

Clarke feels like she’s been punched in the chest. All the air is driven out of her lungs by that number and she reels back, her fingers grasping for purchase on the metal floor. 

If they’ve been asleep for twenty seven years, then… then everyone else she knows… her _parents_ , oh God, her parents will be in their seventies, old enough to be her grandparents. That can’t - that just can’t be real. She never got to say goodbye to her dad - he was on house arrest by the time she was put into cryo.

“My sister,” Bellamy chokes out, and the horror in his eyes tells Clarke he’s had a similar train of thought. “If she’s awake, if she’s out there, she’ll be forty four.”

Raven shakes her head in a daze. 

“I don’t think there’s anyone out there at all,” she says quietly. “They would have come for us… wouldn’t they?” 

One by one their heads turn to look at the encroaching darkness at the Skybox’s yawning mouth. The fireflies dancing outside, so beautiful a few minutes ago, don’t seem to cast nearly enough light now. The world is suddenly empty and cruel, emptier and crueler than it already became the moment Clarke found Wells’ skeleton. 

Twenty seven years. He’s been dead longer than he was alive. 

  
  


In the morning Clarke and Bellamy begin to bury what’s left of the bodies. She is almost grateful that the decades of decay have left only skeletons in clothing. It puts her a step removed from the horror. Wells’ arm detaches at the elbow joint when she tries to arrange his arms over his chest in his grave and it makes her cry all over again. Bellamy tacitly pretends not to notice, and it might be the kindest he’s been to her yet.

“Were you…” he asks, quiet enough that she could pretend not to have heard. 

“He was my best friend,” Clarke says hollowly. Bellamy looks at the overturned dirt. 

“I’ve never had a friend,” he says. 

“What about Raven?” 

“She’s an ally,” Bellamy replies. “But I never let anyone get close enough to find out about Octavia, and I wasn’t in the mood after she was arrested.” He looks up at the sky and says to himself, like he’s still trying to make sense of the fact: “I haven’t seen her in 28 years.”

“Were any of the…” Clarke stumbles on the word bodies. She gestures at the row of graves. “Did any of the clothes look familiar?” He shakes his head. “Then maybe she’s out there.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” he says, bitter enough that Clarke doesn’t bring it up again.

On the way back to the Skybox Bellamy grabs her arm all of a sudden and covers her mouth when she opens it to protest. He points into the underbrush just as she’s about to bite his hand and then - 

Clarke sees the deer. There’s no end to the sights on Earth that take her breath away. She and Bellamy stand and watch it graze for a moment, and Clarke drinks in the flick of its ears, the sinew in its neck, the careful elegance of its steps on uneven ground. Its beauty almost makes up for their grisly morning chore. 

She elbows Bellamy. “Shoot it!” she hisses out of the corner of her mouth. 

“What?”

“It’s meat,” Clarke whispers. 

“It’s…” Bellamy gestures helplessly. “It’s beautiful.”

“We can’t keep eating apples forever. Shoot it or I will,” Clarke says. She’s not sure how she’ll get the gun from him when she failed to do so when he was just thawed, but she’ll burn that bridge when she gets to it.

“Do you even know how?” he asks with a scowl. Her hesitation must be answer enough, because Bellamy grimaces and slips the gun out of its holster. Clarke watches the deer instead. She sees the moment its head snaps back with the bullet’s impact, sees how it stays standing for a brief moment before the legs crumple. Bellamy looks vaguely nauseated, so Clarke forges ahead, pushing branches out of the way. The eyes are already going clouded when she reaches the body. She touches its neck reverently and is struck by its warmth, the coarseness of the fur under her fingertips. She might be the first human to be touching an animal in over 120 years. 

“It was a clean shot,” she says over her shoulder. “Didn’t suffer.” 

When they finally return to the Skybox, streaked with dirt up to their forearms, lugging the carcass between them, it’s to a Raven surrounded by gnawed apple cores and calculations scratched into the metal floor with a piece of metal debris. 

“I guess that’s dinner?” Raven asks, raising an eyebrow at the carcass. Bellamy stares at it for a moment like he still can’t believe he killed it, and then shakes his head roughly and marches out. 

“I’ll go find water,” he says over his shoulder. Clarke watches him walk away with their only weapon and sighs heavily before sitting next to Raven. 

“Any improvement on the leg?”

“No,” Raven says shortly, her face going dark and shuttered. Clarke is starting to pick up on enough of her body language to know not to press it. And honestly, she wasn’t expecting Raven to say yes. “We have a problem.”

 _You mean, besides all of this?_ Clarke wants to ask. Raven taps her scratching stick against the numbers etched into the floor. 

“All I can do at this point is guesswork, but there’s an alert in the logs that I think corresponds to the moment the Skybox broke in half.” She jerks her chin towards the empty, dark pods near the mouth of the opening. “Because after that moment, I lose data for the cryo pods in the other half. 34 seconds later, the batch near the tear lose power and there’s… a lot of errors, honestly. I think that’s the moment we hit the ground.”

“34 seconds… so the other half of the Skybox should be close, right?” Clarke says, grasping at the only part of Raven’s explanation that makes sense to her. 

“A chunk of space station this big falling from orbit?” Raven murmurs looking at the structure around them. “I’m gonna guess our terminal velocity was like, 300 kilometers an hour. Depends on the drag, I don’t know, I’m making shit up. But at the speeds we must have hit… you could get pretty far in 34 seconds, and we don’t even know what direction to start searching in. And that’s _just_ the other half of the Skybox. I don’t have any data on when we broke apart from the rest of the Ark, since each station runs on its own power grid from pre-Unity days.”

“So…”

“So I don’t know how to find the others, and I don’t know how to break it to Bellamy,” Raven snaps, and Clarke finally sees the wobble of her lower lip. 

“I’m sure you did your best,” Clarke says lamely. She sighs and puts her head in her hands. “So as far as we know, we’re the only three humans on Earth?”

Raven is silent for a moment. 

“Fifty six,” she says. Clarke’s head snaps up, and belatedly she looks for the nearest pod screen. Her heart skips a beat when she sees the thawing progress bar halfway full. 

“ _Raven!_ ” she cries out. “We have no food, no water - “

“And five working legs between the three of us!” Raven retorts. “Can’t rebuild a civilization on your own, Griffin, and even if you could, the others deserve to wake up too. And even if it weren’t the right thing to do… the batteries are starting to fail. Best case scenario people would have started waking up on their own like you did. Worst case…” she punches her outstretched, unresponsive leg.

“Oh my god,” Clarke mumbles. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. I miss my dad.”

 _Twenty seven years._ The lost time sits in the silence between her and Raven, demanding to be acknowledged. 

“We solve one problem at a time,” Raven says quietly. _I don’t even know where to start_ , Clarke thinks despairingly. 

The delinquents begin waking up in the afternoon, the timers running out and the lids popping open in a gentle wave moving from the back of the Skybox to the open mouth. Clarke helps Raven walk over to the pod of one Finn Collins, and stands awkwardly off to the side as they embrace, as Raven breaks the news in words too soft and loving to be heard over the exclaims rippling through the rest of the aisles. 

“Don’t touch the sharp bits! You could get tetanus,” Clarke tells the boys poking at the rusted struts at the opening of the Skybox. One of them rolls his eyes immediately. The others don’t look much more convinced. 

“What the hell happened?” a voice calls out over the crowd of confused, drowsy heads. Clarke’s hands clench into fists at her side. Raven is still wrapped in the arms of the boy she loved enough to freeze for. Bellamy still hasn’t come back. 

Jake Griffin would tell them everything he knows. So Clarke takes a deep breath and clambers on top of her old cryo pod to get some height.

“I know this is going to be really hard to hear,” she says, projecting her voice over the murmurs. “But what we know so far is that when the Ark put us on ice to buy time to fix the oxygen problem… they failed. And they decided our only chance of survival was coming down to Earth. We don’t know where the other half of the Skybox is, or the other stations. Some of us didn’t make it. And the worst news is… we’ve been asleep for twenty seven years.”

The girl nearest Clarke, Harper, she thinks her name is, covers her mouth and stares up with wide, horrified eyes. Clarke swallows hard and lets the news sink in for a moment, watching some of the kids start to cry, watching some shake their heads in disbelief. 

“I know we all have questions. We all want to find our people. But we can’t go charging off onto a planet we don’t - “ she begins.

“Our people?” a deep voice calls from the back. Delinquents move out of the way as the speaker walks forward, his steps slow and deliberate. Predatory. “ _Our_ people? Maybe they’re yours, Griffin, but they’re not ours. They left us to rot! We’re expendable to them!” 

“That’s not really fair, Dax,” Miller says halfheartedly. “We don’t have answers - “

“Shut it,” Dax snarls. “We all remember where you came from, Alpha kid. I knew you only messed around to look cool. Of course you’d side with the Councilwoman’s daughter the instant shit goes south.”

“Oh, we’re not friends,” Miller says flatly, jerking his chin at Clarke, who tries not to let the hurt show on her face. 

“The Ark wouldn’t have abandoned us intentionally,” Clarke says instead, trying to drag the conversation away from name-calling. “I know enough of you have family out there - “

“I don’t,” Dax says with a sneer, striding forward so quickly that Clarke doesn’t have time to react. “ _Your_ family floated mine. And I am _sick_ of a Griffin woman telling me what to do.” Just as he reaches her, he knocks her legs out from underneath her and Clarke falls back against the lid of her cryo pod, all the air forced out of her lungs by the impact, her vision flickering for a second. She lets out a ragged gasp but doesn’t manage to breathe in any air before she feels the hand around her throat. 

She’s only distantly aware of shouting, hands grabbing at Dax’s shoulders, her kicking feet connecting with a warm body. Dax’s face fills her entire world view, and the most terrifying part of this isn’t the burn of her lungs or the pain around her neck. It’s the look on his face. The anger has vanished, replaced by a sort of perfect, calm intent, like there’s nothing else in the world but Clarke and his hands squeezing her throat. It’s the calm that convinces Clarke he’s really going to kill her, and she can’t do anything about it but gasp and claw at his hands with shaking fingers. 

And then the terrible weight is torn off of her and Bellamy is standing between her and Dax, the gun in one hand pointing straight up at the Skybox’s ceiling. The crack of the gunshot makes Clarke’s ears ring and she rolls off the cryo pod to fall on her hands and knees behind him, drawing air in desperate, heaving gulps. The Skybox falls perfectly silent.

“The next time one of you tries to kill another kid,” Bellamy says, “I will put a bullet in your head. This is your only warning. Are we clear?”

 _Oh my god_ , Clarke thinks, in the one corner of her brain that isn’t screaming. _This is a goddamn Lord of the Flies re-enactment_. She hated that book.

“Dax is right about one thing,” Bellamy continues when there are no protests. “And that’s that the Ark never gave a crap about any of us. To them, we _are_ expendable. But that means that all we have right now is each other, and I will not tolerate any bullshit in-fighting because you have twenty seven years of pent up teenage testorone.”

Nervous giggles in the crowd. There’s suddenly an outstretched hand in front of Clarke’s face. She looks up. Bellamy’s expression is unreadable, except for his eyes. She’s close enough to see the fear in them. She takes the hand and lets him pull her to her feet. 

“If the Ark abandoned us, they abandoned her too. Without Clarke, we’d still all be frozen. She brought back apples, meat for us. She’s one of us. And if I’m not mistaken, she’s the only person here with any medical experience. So I _will_ kill the next person who lays a hand on her,” Bellamy says. He surveys the gathered delinquents with one more glare and finally holsters the gun. Clarke tries not to sway at his side even though she’s still feeling dangerously light-headed. “Good talk. I need five volunteers to come with me to the river, and five to go foraging with Clarke. The rest of you can surpass my expectations by not starting another fight by the time we get back. Maybe you can figure out fire.”

 _We’re really going to let them try to start fires unsupervised?_ Clarke thinks hazily, but then Harper links their arms together and says she’d love to go see the apple tree, and Bellamy is striding off before Clarke can say anything, or thank him for saving her life. She watches his broad shoulders disappear into the sea of surly delinquents and her heart beats uncertainly against her ribs. Her gaze flicks between the nearby faces, trying to map aggression, trying to see the next blow before it comes.

She leads Harper and her friends to the apple tree in a daze, and it’s only seeing their faces light up in wonder as they see the forest and take their first bite of the fruit that grounds her again. Clarke shows them the sling she made out of her jacket the first time and they all pile as many apples as they can into the folds of their clothing. Jasper walks next to her on the way back and gives her neck sideways glances. 

“You’re starting to bruise. But it’s kind of badass,” he says hastily when she turns her head and raises an eyebrow. Clarke traces the echo of Dax’s hands with her fingertip and tries to breathe evenly.

Raven actually does manage to get a fire going that night using the sparks from some frayed wires. They roasted ragged chunks of the deer over it as the forest gets dark and frightening again and the insects return in full force. The meat is tough and sinewy but everyone licks their fingers and wants more after it’s been picked clean. Clarke stares at the sparks that spiral up into the sky as the woodfire crackles and wonders how they’re supposed to feed 56 people. Bellamy’s already three bullets down, and she’s afraid of what might happen when he runs out. 

She gets to her feet and goes looking for him. Finds him on the outskirts of the camp, staring into the dark forest like someone might walk into the radius of the fire’s warm glow if he wishes hard enough. 

“Thank you for earlier,” she murmurs instead of a greeting. Bellamy is slow to turn his head and acknowledge her. 

“I didn’t do it for you,” he says, and Clarke loses the desire to talk to him about their next steps. “Hey,” he says as she’s walking away. She stops. “They weren’t all… Some of them were trying to stop Dax.”

“More than half?” Clarke asks. He hesitates, and she shakes her head. She finds a nice hollow between two tree roots and curls up really small, hoping she’s close enough to Bellamy that no one will bother her in the middle of the night. All around her the delinquents are gathered in pairs and groups, catching up with each other, speculating about the planet they’ve woken up on. Raven hasn’t let go of Finn since he woke, and Bellamy sits with his grief like it’s its own person.

Clarke has never felt more alone.

There is a lot of work in those first few days, but after burying Wells very little of it feels like work. Clarke begins to map out the forest spiraling out from the Skybox, taking a few delinquents with her at a time. Ostensibly it’s to look for more pieces of the Ark, but they’re frequently distracted by herbs familiar from their Earth Skills class, by the glimpses of wildlife between trees, by good firewood. After a week they learn the ground reliably slopes upwards to the west, and so Clarke packs enough apples for the day and walks, one foot in front of the other. 

Monty and Jasper chatter happily a few steps behind her at the start of their hike, but by afternoon they are having to scramble over rocks and everyone is panting too hard to speak. It’s worth it when they reach the peak and the forest is laid out over the valley like a bumpy green blanket. They all drop their packs onto the ground and find rocks to sit on and rest. On the very distant horizon there is a line of gray-blue darker than the sky and Clarke’s heart beats faster when she sees it. She thinks it might be an ocean.

“That’s the Skybox there, isn’t it?” Finn asks as he climbs up her rock and sits at her side. He’s been joining a lot of the foraging groups this week. Raven complains when he hangs about her that he’s getting in her light or distracting her, but then she looks so sad when he wanders off and volunteers to leave the camp. Clarke feels guilty about it, wishes she knew what’s wrong with Raven’s leg that it still won’t respond to her commands, but Finn has turned out to be a capable tracker, and even after the speech Bellamy made she can’t be picky about which delinquents are willing to hang around her. 

She follows the line of his outstretched arm to a faint trickle of smoke rising between the trees. Their campfire. Amazing how distant it looks from up here. Clarke makes a vaguely agreeable murmur and keeps scanning the horizon, but it’s just endless green. No other smoke. No other sign of civilization.

It’s like humans were never here at all. 

“So what’s your story?” Finn asks, nudging her arm with his elbow. 

“What?” Clarke asks, a little absent, the dread of the Ark’s absence leaving her chill even in the warm afternoon sun.

“What did you get arrested for?” Finn asks with a crooked grin, clearly expecting some fun story. He’s - he’s sweet, Clarke supposes, but lighthearted and careless in a way that has grated on her a few times in the past days. She’s not quite sure how he and Raven fit together. His smile flounders after several seconds pass and she’s still frowning at him, silent. 

“My dad found the oxygen leak,” she says at last. “And he wanted to tell everyone. I think they would have floated him to keep it quiet, but… then they’d be down their best engineer. So my mom had me arrested as leverage.”

“That seems like a dumb plan,” Finn says. “What was she gonna do if he refused, float you?”

“You haven’t met my mother,” Clarke mutters, slipping off the rock and stretching her sore calves. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. Hasn’t mattered in twenty seven years.”

The route they take home traces the edge of a marshier patch in the forest, where the soil is rich and dark and _wet_. Jasper and Monty crouch down and exclaim over it for several minutes, telling her in great detail about how fertile it must be, that the smell is part of it - but it reminds Clarke too much of burying Wells and the other delinquents who didn’t wake, and perhaps something shows on her face, because they go quiet and let her lead them away. By the time Clarke spots the Skybox between the trees, she’s covered in sweat, mud splatters up to her knees, and bug bites on her exposed arms and neck. 

Many of the other delinquents are lounging around the Skybox, napping in the ferns or playing tag between the trees, their laughter carrying. Clarke almost wishes she could be one of them, but she thinks something inside of her broke when she woke up and Wells was gone. 

Maybe not. Maybe she never was the sort of person who could relax in the sun while her people are still missing.

Finn follows leisurely behind her with a handful of wildflowers. Raven rolls her eyes when he presents them to her, but Clarke is starting to pick up on her subtle signals. She sees the smallest corner of a smile as Raven buries her nose in them for just a second before setting the bundle down on top of a nearby pod. 

“How’s the leg?” Clarke calls out. The smile on Raven’s face wavers ever so slightly.

“This is fine,” Raven says, hobbling uncertainly down the Skybox’s aisle, leaning on pods as she passes them. 

“It might feel okay now, but the limp over time is going to cause you more damage,” Clarke says, her eyes fixed upon the makeshift brace Raven has built for her unresponsive leg out of… honestly, Clarke doesn’t know where she found the pieces. Her only contribution has been the padding around her thigh and ankle, because Raven, in her crusade to regain her freedom of movement as fast as possible, is blatantly disregarding the pain it’s causing her. 

“It’s fine,” Raven says tightly. “I’ll be back to normal soon.”

“I’ll show you all the best places,” Finn says, looping his arm around Raven’s waist and pulling her flush against his side with an easy grin. Clarke’s stomach turns as she watches Raven laugh, some of the tension melting out of her shoulders. She doesn’t want to be the one who breaks their bubble of happiness, but it’s better to do it now than to let it hurt more later. 

“Raven…” she begins. “If the nerves in your leg were going to recover from cryosleep… they would have already.” Raven is shaking her head before she’s even finished speaking. 

“No, I don’t - “ 

“We’re not going to lose hope,” Finn cuts on, physically stepping between them. “You worry too much, princess.”

Raven’s face is unreadable over Finn’s shoulder. Clarke glances between her and Finn’s unwavering smile and steps back. 

“I just want you to manage your expectations,” she says quietly. She grabs her long-sleeved shirt - she’s lucky no one’s stolen it out of her pod while she was gone - and stomps off to the river, trying to shake the memory of Raven’s face, the grief only barely held at bay. She must not manage to hide her frustration and guilt entirely because the youngest of the delinquents leaps out of her way with eyes that are even wider than usual. “Sorry Charlotte,” Clarke murmurs, feeling another pang of guilt when the girl scurries away between the trees.

Clarke hears Bellamy before she sees him; a rhythmic, hollow _thock_ sound keeping pace with her heartbeat. She crests the hill overlooking the river and almost stumbles on her next step when she sees bare skin. He had nice shoulders underneath the shirt, too, but somehow he looks even broader without it, and that warm and freckled back is gleaming with sweat where the dappled sun hits it. Clarke swallows as he raises the axe they liberated from the emergency kit. Muscles ripple. 

The next _thock_ startles her out of a dream she hadn’t realized she’d dipped into and she averts her gaze quickly, making a beeline past him for the river. She doesn’t look in his direction but she’s painfully aware of him in her periphery, and just as she thinks she’s past him he calls out to her. 

“Where are you going?”

Clarke stops in her tracks. Takes a deep breath. Turns around.

“To the river,” she says, injecting just enough impatience into her tone to let him know she’s not really down to chit chat. He’s breathing a little faster than he would at a resting heart rate and it’s making his already distracting pectorals even more offensive. Clarke stares determinedly at his face and no lower. “I’m filthy, I need a bath.”

“Did you find anything?” he asks, and the thinly-disguised hope shatters her resolve to be rude. 

“No,” she admits quietly. “Nothing.”

He nods absently, staring into the woods in the direction she’d come from, and they both know that after he’s finished cutting wood he’ll go off and do a lap of his own, just in case. Just in case he can find something she missed. She’s not really sure when he finds the time to sleep. Clarke starts to turn around, figuring that’s the end of it.

“Are you going to bathe alone?” he asks with a small cough.

“Well, I don’t exactly have a line of people fighting to be my friend,” Clarke says dryly.

Bellamy doesn’t say anything to that, not aloud, but his eyes flicker over her shoulder. Clarke looks back and sees Dax and a few of his friends watching them, their mouths smiling without any humour. 

“Ah,” she says. “Guess your speech about everyone getting along wasn’t as effective as you hoped.”

“They’re too stupid to realize it’s bad tactics. You never attack the medic.” When Clarke doesn’t laugh, Bellamy tilts his head, frowns. “That was a joke,” he says. 

“That was a joke?”

“Nevermind.” He hefts the axe over his shoulder and closes the gap between them. “I’ll come with you, I need to wash up too.”

Clarke remains rooted to the spot. “I don’t - I don’t think that’s really appropriate,” she manages to say, sounding strangled even to her own ears. 

“I’m not going to watch,” he says. “We’ll go one at a time, whatever makes you comfortable. But I’m not leaving you alone until Dax’s temper has cooled off.”

For the first time, she’s not sure if he’s lying to her, if he’s trying to be reassuring or he really believes that Dax will forgive and forget. If Clarke were a different person, maybe, but she was born and raised on Alpha Station for the first eighteen years of her life and she knows that never washes out. 

Bellamy looks at her expectantly and Clarke wants that bath too badly to stand around arguing with him, so she just sighs and walks onwards. She hears the river gurgling happily over the rocks before she sees it, and the sound still fills her with some kind of wonder. The river is only a little wider across than she is tall and still it is more water in one place than she has ever seen in her life. All in all the water following its path downriver in a single day might be more than the amount they had up on the Ark, recycled 97 years over. She’s not remotely ready to start contemplating the sliver of ocean she saw on the horizon during her hike with Finn, Monty and Jasper today. 

She kicks her boots off at the water’s edge and then stands, hesitating, as Bellamy catches up, her pace languid and unhurried as he winds through the trees after her, searching for the source of birdsong in the canopy. He raises his eyebrows when he sees her waiting and gives her the faintest of smirks before finding a rock to lean back against, deliberately facing away from the river. 

“Your honour is safe, princess,” he says. “Shout if a fish starts eating you.”

“That’s another joke, right?” she asks dryly. She watches the back of his head as she undresses and piles her clothes on top of her boots. The forest is peaceful and quiet around them - well, quiet relative to the sound of delinquents nearer to the Skybox.

“This is kind of nice, actually,” Bellamy says, as Clarke wades deeper into the river, shivering as the cool water reaches her waist. The rocky bottom is sharp and painful against her bare feet, but after twenty seven years of sleep Clarke is ready to feel anything that reminds her she’s alive. “I haven’t had time, since we woke up, to lie back and just watch the clouds. They’re more interesting from this side than I thought they would be.”

“The _clouds?_ ” Clarke asks incredulously, wondering if she’s heard him right. She turns back towards the shore and he hasn’t moved since he sat down. She can only see the top of his head from this angle, his dark curls spilling out over the rock he’s leaned against.

“Yeah. There’s one that uh, kinda looks like a bull, could be a minotaur.”

“What’s a minotaur?” Clarke asks. The river is not quite deep enough to swim, but she crouches and scoops up handfuls of water to wash her chest.

“A monster,” Bellamy replies immediately, and then hums thoughtfully, reconsidering. “Well, in most stories. It’s a half-human, half-bull creature. I always thought they got a bad rap.”

“What half’s the bull?” Clarke asks, slowly submerging herself up to the chin and letting her hair soak. She sees his head jerk to the side, sees him catch himself before he turns to look at her.

“The top half,” he replies, apparently scandalized that she has to ask. She can’t see his face from this angle but she can picture the frown and it almost makes her smile.

“It wasn’t obvious!” Clarke says defensively. “They could be like centaurs.”

“Now I’m picturing all the minotaurs in my favourite myths like that and I think you’ve ruined my childhood.”

“Tell me one,” Clarke asks, wading out of the river and marveling at the sensation of the warm breeze against her wet skin. Bellamy hums thoughtfully as she dresses, and by the time she sits next to him he is already weaving the threads of a story together, hesitantly at first, like it is an art he nearly forgot. Clarke lays back against the rock and watches the clouds shift in the sky between the gaps in the trees. The sound of his voice and the soft drone of insects lulls her into the first moment of peace she’s really felt since Raven told them how long they were asleep. 

Clarke wakes up to Bellamy shaking her shoulders, drops of water falling from his wet hair onto her face. He must have bathed while she slept.

“Had a good nap?” he asks, retreating as she sits up groggily. 

“I guess,” Clarke says, rubbing at her face. “I must have needed that.”

She thinks he’s looking at her chest, when she lowers her hand. But that doesn’t quite seem to match his expression, something angry, disgusted. It only takes her a moment to piece things together, to remember Jasper saying she was starting to bruise. Her hand flies up to her neck. 

“How bad does it look?” she asks lightly. 

Bellamy shakes his head and leads the way back to the Skybox without further comment. He doesn’t look at her again.

Still. It feel nice to have an ally.

And just when she thinks they might have a new normal, they find the first of the other Ark stations.


	2. like this morning reveals to me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, _many_ thanks for @marauders-groupie for going above and beyond in beta-ing this. All I expected was one or two sentences saying "yeah it flows" or "no, this part's jarring and your attempt at smut sucks" and instead got so much encouragement and praise that it really helped me get out of a rut and finish this. You're incredible, Lana. 
> 
> **CONTENT WARNINGS:** murder! Also canon-typical violence, some more general spookiness like the first chapter, and some sexual content that's a little more descriptive than my usual.

#

Farm Station fell at the edge of the scrublands, and when Clarke first sees the trail of debris she doesn't think there can possibly be anything intact left at the end. Even twenty seven years haven't managed to erase the deep gouge left in the earth. Here, a bubbling creek diverted through the swaying grasses. There, shards of metal as tall as she is, half-buried in the dirt and jutting out proudly against the grass that has started growing over it.

Miller doesn't let them stop to look at anything for long.

"The main camp is up ahead," he insists. Monroe shadows him, her face ashen. She hasn't said a word aloud since they returned from their scouting trip. Clarke would have liked to go investigate Farm Station with a smaller contingent, but the word spread through the delinquents like wildfire, and no one wanted to stay back at the Skybox.

Clarke freezes in her tracks when she sees the waymarker - flat rocks piled in the shape of a figure atop a boulder. Undeniable evidence that once, there was someone else on the Earth, someone before the delinquents. A small hand brushes against her slack palm and Clarke flinches, but it is only Charlotte, the youngest of the delinquents, her eyes wide and afraid. None of them are immune to the way the scrublands make them feel small. The forest, at least, seemed to have a ceiling, but the only cover on these plains are jutting rocks and tall swaying grasses and the occasional scraggly tree. Clarke cannot look up into the sky without feeling like she will somehow lose her footing on Earth and fall upward into it. And the scrublands are so.... unnaturally quiet. She can hardly begrudge Charlotte's nervousness.

So she guiltily takes Charlotte's hand and leads the delinquents clustered around her forwards.

The greater part of Farm Station lies on the slope of a gentle hill, slowly rusting. The swaying grasses seem to whisper to Clarke as she steps between them. Bellamy is already standing at the station's mouth, and she doesn't miss the way he has his handgun out, even if it's at his side. He waits for Clarke to catch up, even flashes a reassuring smile at Charlotte, before he heads in.

Inside the station's remains it is cool and dark, and something long broken drips rhythmically in the shadows.

Someone from Farm Station survived the impact. Clarke could have lied to herself, could have insisted the waymarker outside was left over from before the apocalypse, but there is too much other evidence. Rough chairs and tables, made out of wood by uncertain hands touching it for the first time in generations. Finn finds the stumps around back, their hollows rotting, the outer ring too perfectly flat to have been cut by anything else but a saw yielded by human hands. The vegetable garden is almost invisible at first, overgrown with weeds, its neat rows buried, but once Jasper and Monty point it out to her Clarke cannot unsee the ghosts of their people planting the seeds and tilling the soil.

Someone from Farm Station survived the impact, and lived here for some time, making their mark on the tiniest patch of ground.

"Where the hell did they go?" Bellamy murmurs, staring hard at the flat, unremarkable horizon. Wherever it was, they didn't leave in a hurry. They had time to tuck the chairs into the tables, to put the farm tools away inside, to pack their things.

"I want to go home," Charlotte murmurs to Clarke.

Clarke swallows hard and kneels in front of Charlotte, squeezing her hands in what she hopes is a comforting way.

“The Ark is gone, Charlotte,” she says. There’s no way around it. They’re never getting back up into the sky, and Clarke doesn’t think she’d want to go back even if they could. The problem with the ground isn’t _where_ they are, it’s _when_. “Home now is what we make of it, and someone already started making one here. The furniture, the farm - “

“No,” Bellamy interrupts, and Clarke startles to find him lurking just behind her, listening in.

“At least consider it,” Clarke says, standing and turning to face him. “We have no real shelter back at the Skybox - “

“Then we’ll build it,” he says, staring at her evenly. “But this place…” he casts a look about the ruins of Farm Station, the corners of his mouth twisted down in a grimace. “This feels haunted.”

“Didn’t think you believed in ghosts,” Clarke says.

“I don’t,” Bellamy says shortly. “That’s why I said _feels_ , not _is_.”

“That’s a petty distinction,” she mutters as Bellamy brushes past her and yells out for everyone’s attention. The delinquents gravitate closer to him like moths to a light as he instructs them to pick up anything useful that can be carried back to the Skybox. Clarke remembers how lost he looked when he first woke up to his sister’s disappearance. When she squints she still sees that version of him leaking through the cracks, but if she didn’t know to look he’d seem so strong, so unafraid.

Nothing about this is okay. But the delinquents, they look like they need to believe someone isn’t afraid. So Clarke stays silent as Bellamy divies them up and they disperse.

A moment later from around the corner, he calls out -

“Clarke! Come look at this.”

Charlotte looks up in a panic as Clarke stands. Luckily, Harper is nearby and reaches out her hand quickly.

“Come with me, Charlotte! Let’s see if we can find any good fruit in that farm,” she says, smiling kindly, and with only another nervous backward look Charlotte accepts her outstretched hand. Over her head, Harper jerks her chin in Bellamy’s direction and winks. Clarke grimaces and very stubbornly doesn’t think too hard about why Harper is winking.

She finds Bellamy inside a small apartment down the hall. Clarke is instantly hit with a wave of homesickness stronger than any she’s felt since they woke up. This apartment is smaller than hers was on Alpha Station, the sleeping area separated from the workspace by a broken sliding screen rather than in its own room, but the shape of the doorway, the comfort of the low ceiling… she strokes her hand down the nearest wall and the rust stains her fingertips. Her fleeting smile fades. Earth’s mark on the apartment is unmistakable. Even here, deep inside the station, there are weeds growing in the cracks between the floor panels. Clarke reaches out to touch the dried husks of a few dead flowers still propped up in a cup on the desk and the petals crumble into dust.

“Look at this,” Bellamy says, tapping the sliding screen with one finger. Clarke moves to his side and tilts her head curiously. It takes her a moment to realize that the faded squiggles drawn on the screen are a topographic map. Bellamy glances over and grins when she gasps. “Yeah,” he says, circling a nearby X on the map with his index finger. “That’s what I thought.”

“One, two…” Clarke murmurs, her eyes darting all over the screen, “…five, six X’s. They could be other stations. Maybe that’s where everyone’s gone,” she says urgently, grabbing Bellamy’s arm. “Maybe they all congregated together at one of the other crash sites.”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Bellamy says, and there it is again, the flicker of desperation in his eyes, his voice just a little strained at the edges. “But this time, we’re not going to make the mistake of getting everyone's hopes up. Just in case it’s another dead end.”

Clarke bites her lip.

“Yeah, I guess that’s a good point,” she murmurs. “As long as we don’t get our own hopes up,” she says pointedly.

“You don’t need to worry about my feelings, princess,” Bellamy retorts.

“Why me, anyway?” Clarke asks. Bellamy stares at her hands for a moment, and her skin prickles under the weight of those dark eyes.

“Who better to keep secrets than the daughter of a Councilwoman?” he says coldly, and just like that the warmth Clarke had felt from being the first person he told fades.

“Fine,” she snaps.

“You can remember the map, right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Clarke says. “But if we find some paper, that would be even better. I’m a pretty good artist.”

“I know,” Bellamy says, already rifling through the abandoned desk to see if there’s anything useful. Clarke blinks.

“…You do?”

“Everyone in Factory knew you’d trade your dessert rations for art supplies,” Bellamy replies absently. “For most of us, you were the only chance we’d ever get to taste some.” He straightens up and brandishes a scrap of graph paper and the stub of a pencil at her. “Here. Fit as much as you can on it.”

Clarke takes the paper on autopilot, still reeling from his words. She… she’d never known that.

“Okay,” she murmurs, shaking her head to put herself back on track.

She never hears Bellamy walk out. Just looks up after cramming a tiny version of the map onto the scrap paper and realizes she is alone in the room. The shaft of sunlight coming in through the small porthole in the outer wall has migrated several steps closer to the wall in the time she’s spent drawing, and the shift in the light illuminates gentle whirlwinds of dust. The room is utterly silent, and for a moment Clarke is seized with terror that she’s alone again, that the delinquents have vanished without a trace like the rest of her people.

She snatches up her copied map and sprints out the room, knocking over a rotting wooden chair and stumbling shoulder-first into the far wall of the corridor outside. Her breath echoes raggedly in her ears as she reels back and follows the curve of the corridor back outside. After the darkness of the abandoned station, the sunlight is painfully bright, and Clarke winces as she’s blinded.

Her heart doesn’t seem to slow even after her vision adjusts and she sees the delinquents silhouetted against the evening sun in the fields, picking over the station’s remains.

“You okay?” Monty asks, striding past with an armful of scavenged tech. “You’re doing something weird with your face.”

Clarke blinks at him, still breathing hard. He wasn’t there, the first night after she woke up. None of them were. They all feel alone and abandoned, but none more so than her. She cannot say aloud how terrifying it was to look up in that room and realize she was alone, to feel like another 27 years had slipped through her fingers while she wasn’t paying attention.

“I’m fine,” Clarke says tightly, and Monty looks a little dubious, but he leaves her alone after that.

Someone finds a wheelbarrow, only a little rusted, and the delinquents pile it high with supplies to take back to the Skybox. Clarke walks at the front of the long column of children, tracing the path they made here by the crushed dry grass. The sun sinks lower and lower, burning the westward side of her face and throwing the delinquents’ shadows across the orange-streaked scrubland until their long-limbed silhouettes look like monsters stalking alongside them, barely recognizable as human in origin.

The back of Clarke’s neck prickles as they reach the treeline, and for some reason she thinks of Bellamy admitting that he already knew her - already knew _of_ her - from the Ark. The way he had said it made it sound so simple, but it makes her warmer than the sunset. She turns to look over her shoulder, but she doesn’t see the familiar head of dark curls anywhere near.

It wasn’t Bellamy’s eyes she felt on her. It was Dax’s.

Clarke’s faint smile fades as she meets his burning gaze, and despite the warm evening and the throng of bodies between them, goosebumps creep up over her skin. She ducks her head and keeps walking into the forest, wondering when she’ll finally stop feeling the cold of cryosleep.

  
  
  
  


No one says it aloud, but the discovery of Farm Station marks a shift in the delinquents’ attitude. No longer are they children playing in the woods to pass the time until they find the rest of their people. The lost twenty seven years begin to sink in. They pull together. There are almost no complaints when Clarke draws up some plans for rough cabins and Bellamy starts passing out work assignments.

Bellamy wakes her two mornings later, in the middle of a dream where Dax’s hands are around her neck again and all the delinquents are gathered around, cheering him on so loudly her ears still ring when she sits up with a gasp and takes a wild swing at the air just in front of Bellamy’s face.

“It’s just me,” he hisses, looking vaguely offended that she’s tried punching him so early in the morning. Clarke stares at him in bewilderment, her chest heaving with her rapid breathing.

“Sorry,” she murmurs. “I was dreaming.” He doesn’t ask about what, just stands and offers her his hand. Clarke lets him pull her up to her feet and glances at Monroe and Miller, who are luckily still sleeping on either side of her, curled up in the roots of a mossy tree. They both look so much younger in sleep.

“Still have that map?” Bellamy asks, his voice low so as to not wake the delinquents still sleeping in loose clusters around them.

“Yeah, sure,” Clarke mumbles, rubbing her face with one hand and pulling the crumpled scrap of paper out of her back pocket with the other. Bellamy snatches it and holds it close to his face, his eyes narrowing as he tries to read her tiny scribbles in the dim light. “Why’d you wake me so early?”

“The faster we leave, the faster we can get back to camp before anyone decides to burn it down because they had a breakup or someone stole the last apple or whatever.”

“Those are serious matters,” Clarke whispers back, and she manages to keep up a straight face for a whole 30 seconds before Bellamy’s lips twitch and she can’t help but mirror him.

“Raven’s in charge until we return, but there’s only so long her patience will last before she starts throwing things at people’s heads,” he says. Then, tapping at her map, he adds: “We’ll start here. Just the two of us should be able to make a roundtrip by nightfall.”

Clarke has pulled the map out and stared hard at it the past two days as though it could speak and answer her questions if only she looked long enough, and she has it just about memorized, but she still traces the route to the X Bellamy chose when he hands it back to her. It’s the one nearest to the Skybox, just on the other side of the mountain she hiked with Finn and Monty and Jasper to see the ocean from. If there was a station there, just a day’s walk away, and they _still_ failed to find the sleeping delinquents for twenty seven years, then maybe Bellamy was right.

Maybe they _were_ expendable to the Ark.

She hurries out of the camp after him, tugging a pack full of water and rations over her shoulders. The morning is new enough that the dawn that filters through the forest’s canopy is weak and gray. The birds are only now beginning to rouse themselves for their morning chorus, and the dew is halfway to evaporating, still a hazy wet fog that hangs over the moss at knee-height. Clarke takes a deep breath, tasting the fresh air, but the pace Bellamy is setting through the forest doesn’t leave her room to linger.

They don’t speak much as they hike uphill, the forest slowly brightening and waking around them. By the time they crest the mountain Clarke is sweating despite the overcast sky, and she desperately wishes the dew was still around to cool her down. She only barely manages to convince Bellamy to stop at the summit for lunch, and he picks at his food, restless, as she takes small sips of water and wills her heart to slow down. She makes a mental note to apologize to Monty and Jasper for telling them to hurry up the last few times they’ve gone out on a trip with her, now that she’s been on the other side of that.

“What are you going to do,” Clarke asks carefully as Bellamy throws the remaining half of his lunch into his pack and gets ready to move on. “If we don’t find your sister?”

He glances at her so sharply she worries about giving him whiplash. Several emotions flash past on his face - shock, anger, fear, and finally a calm so composed it can’t be anything but a mask.

“I mean this in the nicest way possible, but it’s none of your fucking business,” he snaps, stomping off without a backward look. Clarke scrambles after him.

“It kind of is, though,” she says hurriedly. “Considering we’re in the middle of nowhere together, and - “

“Princess, for once in your life, can you shut up?” Bellamy snaps, stopping so suddenly in his tracks that Clarke nearly walks into his back.

“Fine,” Clarke retorts, stepping around him and picking a way forward through some thorny underbrush. “Because you asked so nicely.” She pushes a branch out of her way and makes the conscious decision to let it go before Bellamy’s caught up, but the sharp hiss of pain he makes when it snaps back and hits him in the stomach doesn’t make her feel better at all.

They don’t talk at all for the rest of the journey except for monotone, short sentences when they need to check the map. Going downhill is easier than uphill whenever they manage to find a path, but they’re forced to detour south along the long rim of a cliff until they can find a safe slope to try climbing down. When Clarke loses her balance, Bellamy pushes her closer to the rock face with one hand at the small of her back and Clarke very grudgingly mutters out a thank you. The overcast sky grows darker and darker, and she catches him sending it furtive glances.

By the time they reach the two peaks marked on the map, the clouds finally give in and start drizzling, gently at first, and then a downpour so thick they can barely see the forest on the other side of the clearing.

“It has to be here,” Clarke says, but they can’t risk taking the map out until they find some kind of shelter from the rain. They start at the peaks and spiral outwards, tracing circles around it, squinting through the rain for any sign of another station. The water is warm, at least, but Clarke’s feet squelch uncomfortably in her drenched boots with every step at Bellamy’s side, until finally - he takes a step forward and they both hear a hollow ring underneath his weight.

They freeze and look at each other. And then, without saying a word, they both drop to their knees and start pulling up clumps of patchy dead grass. The hatch underneath the mud resembles nothing on the Ark, and Clarke can see Bellamy’s shoulders slump out of the corner of her eyes as they uncover it. But it’s what they’ve got for now, so she takes a deep breath and pulls the lever.

Thin rivulets of water stream down at the edges of the hatch. A ladder leads down into pitch darkness.

“I’ll go first,” Bellamy says raggedly, slipping his gun out of its holster and climbing down with it in one hand. Clarke feels goosebumps on her skin again, watching him vanish into the darkness, and tells herself it’s just the rain. She climbs down once Bellamy hollers an all-clear and her feet hit the floor sooner than she expects. The air is stale and smells faintly of mold. Bellamy feels for her backpack in the darkness and Clarke’s pulse roars in her ears for the several tense moments it takes before he manages to strike one of the wet matches from the emergency pack and light a scrap from a banner hanging on the wall. When they finally manage to turn it into a makeshift torch, Bellamy raises it high and they huddle together, watching the shadows dancing around them.

“This isn’t a station,” Clarke says at last.

“No,” Bellamy says, quiet, subdued. He doesn’t protest when Clarke slips her hand in the crook of his elbow and they walk together, carefully, down the length of a long hall, examining empty metal doorways and haphazardly piled crates bearing cans from the mid 21st century. Enough of them are cracked and oozing that Clarke doesn’t look too closely.

They find the skeletons in the last room on the left, dozens of them, many still holding hands. The torch’s flickering light makes their empty eye sockets look like they are winking. Clarke stumbles back out into the hallway, dry-heaving, Wells’ grinning skull imprinted on the back of her eyelids. Bellamy kneels next to her and awkwardly rubs her back until she manages to swallow the nausea down, though she thinks the proximity of the torch might do more to calm her down than he does.

“Guess the bunker wasn’t good enough to save them from the apocalypse,” she mutters at last.

“Guess not,” Bellamy agrees.

Clarke clears her throat one last time and stands, only a little unsteady on her feet. “I’m fine now,” she says. “Let’s keep exploring. If Farm Station thought this was useful enough to mark on their map, maybe we’ll find something.”

“Or they already took anything worthwhile,” Bellamy says.

“I’m sorry it’s not your sister,” Clarke murmurs.

Bellamy is quiet for long enough that she thinks he’s not going to respond, before he says, “Me too.”

In another room they find a dusty generator draped in a veil of cobwebs. Clarke holds the torch high while Bellamy flips switches at random and mutters about wishing Raven were here, but something he does must work because they hear a low groan echoing through the bunker’s walls and a moment later the overhead lights - the ones that aren’t shattered, at least - begin to flicker on. They keep exploring in the weak and uncertain light. The previous Farm Station expedition must have taken the majority of the cans that were still in good condition, but there’s still the generator, a radio, a few beds with intact blankets that don’t even smell that moldy, and then…

“Clarke.”

She turns to find Bellamy standing in front of an armoury. There are over a dozen rifles and handguns mounted in a wall cabinet with little plaques naming them. His grin is as blinding as it is unexpected. The boyish enthusiasm makes him look years younger. 

“Ready to be a badass?” he asks.

Clarke is not nearly as impressed. She stares at the arsenal for a moment, worrying her lip. They need a way to hunt, to defend themselves from large animals while they’re out searching for their people. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t look at those guns and feel a pit of dread in her stomach when she thinks of _teenagers_ wielding them. Best case scenario, someone’s going to accidentally shoot someone. 

Dax’s face flashes through her mind, and Clarke shivers in a way that is unrelated to the bunker’s chill. 

“I’m not going to fight you on bringing them back to the camp,” she says with a sigh. “I get that we need them, but don’t expect me to like it.”

Maybe Bellamy knows the dark turn her thoughts have taken, because his face grows serious as he approaches.

“You need to learn how to do this,” he says, holding a rifle out over the gap between them. Clarke hesitates only another moment before reaching out and taking it. She finds a manual in the cabinet and skims through three pages of safety warnings while Bellamy hangs one of the orange tarps up in the hallway and paints a rough target on it with mud. 

“Is that supposed to be a circle?” Clarke asks, raising her gaze from the manual for a moment and squinting at his work. 

“Shut up,” he replies, smearing one last dot of mud in the very center of the lopsided target and shaking the rest off. “Are you ready to put that down and actually give it a try?”

“I’m supposed to hold it against my shoulder,” Clarke murmurs, hesitantly raising the rifle and trying to get a comfortable grip. It’s surprisingly heavy, and she wonders how she’s supposed to hold it still enough to aim at anything. Bellamy shakes his head and steps close to correct her. 

“Higher,” he murmurs, and his arms brace hers, warm and solid and impossibly steady. He’s close enough that she hears the hitch in his breath when she turns her head. She lets herself meet his dark gaze and feels a thrill when his eyes flicker down. 

Clarke’s lips slowly curve up. “Am I bothering you?” she asks, already knowing the answer. 

Bellamy tilts her chin up with one finger and stares at her through his eyelashes. He leans closer, and she shivers as his breath spills over her ear. 

“You overestimate your effect on people,” he says flatly, and then immediately retreats to lean against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest. He jerks his head towards the target and Clarke raises her rifle nonchalantly, pretending her cheeks aren’t burning. She’s not stupid enough to believe he was unaffected by her, but it still rankles at her how quickly he was able to step back and pretend they hadn’t been on the precipice of something there.

She braces the rifle the way he showed her to and pulls the trigger perhaps more forcefully than necessary. 

The tarp shivers as a bullet passes it, and Clarke’s ears ring as she searches for its mark.

“We have a limited amount of ammo,” Bellamy tells her, sounding unimpressed. “You have to actually try to aim.”

“Be quiet and let me concentrate,” Clarke snaps, and her next shots are slow and measured as she gets used to the scope.

“I’m going to go check if the storm’s letting up,” Bellamy says, after a few minutes of watching her shoot. Clarke makes a vague murmur of agreement and hitches the gun higher in her arms, trying to find an angle where it doesn’t shake as her arms get tired with the weight. She inhales, exhales, and pulls the trigger once more.

There is a new hole just off from the center of the target. Clarke lets out an excited squeak and drops the gun on top of the nearest barrel. She hurries forward to the tarp eagerly and pokes her finger through the hole she just made as if to test if it’s real. It’s only about a finger’s width away from the smear that Bellamy marked in the center. Clarke grins as she hears footsteps descending the ladder into the bunker.

“I know you’re going to say this was beginner’s luck,” Clarke calls out playfully. “But I might just be a badass.”

When there’s no reply, Clarke turns around.

It's not Bellamy climbing down. It's _Dax._ She freezes as he jumps the last few rungs of the ladder to land on the bunker floor with a heavy thud. His eyes remain fixed upon her as he straightens up and takes a predatory step forward. Clarke swears she feels phantom fingers around her neck. And then, like a switch flipping, she's all motion, all fury.

“What did you do to Bellamy?” she snarls.

“Nothing, yet,” Dax says flatly, spinning a shiv in one hand as he strolls closer. Improvised as it may be out of debris from the Skybox, Clarke has no doubts it’ll be sharp enough to cause some damage.

Her eyes flicker to the gun she abandoned atop the barrel. Dax’s do too, and in a split second they’re both running for it. He kicks the barrel over just as Clarke gets to it and the gun goes skittering several steps away, accidentally going off and burying a bullet into the far wall. Oh, Bellamy would have words for her for leaving the safety off when she put it down, but there’s no time to worry about that now. She darts to the side to avoid a wild swing Dax makes at her waist with the shiv. Adrenaline makes her hands shake, makes the world slower. Dax is stronger than her, has more reach, is currently armed where she isn’t, and is committed to killing her.

That’s only two advantages she can level the playing field on. Clarke rolls the barrel into his feet and lunges for her gun while he’s stepping around it. She gets her hands on it but Dax brings the shiv down towards her chest before she can fumble the rifle around and find the trigger. She bashes the side of it into his face instead, clumsy and furious and _burning_ with her anger. She’s done nothing to deserve this. The pained grunt Dax makes when his nose cracks underneath the blow might just be the most brutally satisfying thing she’s ever heard. Her shaking fingers find the trigger and she pulls.

Only for the gun to click uselessly in her hands. Dax’s smile is utterly humourless.

And then - footsteps down the ladder. Dax looks up too, distracted, and it’s his hesitation that makes Clarke’s heart leap up into her throat, makes her think it’s not an ally he’s expecting. She shoves him off of her while he’s still looking at the ladder and rolls just as the shiv scrapes against the floor where her head just was.

“Bellamy!” Clarke yells, scrambling to her feet. He climbs down the ladder far enough to see Dax and freezes for just a split second before leaping the gap, swearing the whole time. Bellamy pushes Clarke behind him and tackles Dax without pulling his handgun out of its holster, like some kind of _idiot_. “The gun, Bellamy!” she yells.

Bellamy grunts as they hit the floor and roll together, both boys struggling for the upper hand.

“Shoot him with yours!” he gasps.

“It’s fucking jammed!” Clarke retorts, already spinning on her heel and running back into the bedroom with the gun cabinet. She finds a small handgun and loads it with the labeled ammunition with shaking hands.

“Why won’t you _die_?” she hears Dax snarl from the other room. Clarke sprints back to them, her heart in her throat.

“Are you sure you clicked the safety off?” Bellamy yells, only to be cut off by a pained grunt as Dax grasps for his dropped shiv and makes a wild slash across Bellamy’s side. Bellamy stumbles backwards, one hand clutching his side, a smear of red between his splayed fingers. Dax wipes the back of his knuckles underneath his broken nose, leaving his cheek bloodied.

“You don’t know how to use that thing,” he tells Clarke over the sound of Bellamy’s ragged breathing. _Yes I do_ , she thinks.

Clarke raises the handgun. Inhales. Exhales. Pulls the trigger.

The sound Dax’s body makes when it hits the floor makes a wave of nausea rise up in Clarke but she can’t look away from his slack face, the unblinking eyes still glittering with malice.

“Holy shit,” she mumbles.

“Princess,” Bellamy breathes. “Think I need some help here.”

Clarke immediately shoves Dax out of her mind to rush to help Bellamy stand. His shirt is drenched in blood just above the hip, where Dax cut him in a long line paralleling the bottom of his ribcage. She helps him walk on unsteady feet to one of the cots in the room with the gun cabinet, where the mattresses are still intact and the linens are only a little moth-bitten. Bellamy exhales heavily as he lies back on the cot, and Clarke knows she needs to tend that wound but - her hands won’t stop shaking. She keeps imagining more footsteps. Would Dax have brought friends? She closes and locks the door to the bedroom first, then shoves a heavy metal desk in front of it for good measure. Inside the desk’s drawers there is an incredibly basic medkit, hardly more than bandages and ice packs.

Bellamy’s eyes open and fixate on her as she approaches. Clarke feels his gaze on her face even as she crouches next to the cot and lifts his hands and the shirt away from the wound. She breathes out a sigh of relief as she examines it and finds it fairly shallow. All that blood had scared her, but he won’t even need stitches. She tells Bellamy as much, babbling about her process to fill the silence as she disinfects the cut and tapes down a plaster. He says nothing even as she rocks back on her heels and closes her eyes, trying to block out the image of Dax’s empty face.

“I killed him,” she mumbles. “Oh my god, they hate me already - 

“It was self defense,” Bellamy says lowly, reaching out and grabbing her hand. “Clarke, look at me. He _forced_ us.”

“They won’t care,” Clarke says, feeling sick to her stomach and trying to turn away. Only Bellamy’s grip on her hand keeps her tethered in place.

“They don’t have to know,” Bellamy says. “Clarke, I won’t tell them. As far as we know, he wandered off a cliff. We never saw him. _Look at me_.”

Clarke reluctantly raises her head, and flinches as Bellamy’s hand cups up to cup her cheek. He’s looking at her, eyes dark, and Clarke suddenly realizes it’s the first time. He didn’t look at her when he awoke and he saw Earth for the first time, or when he saved her life, or when they bathed in the river. For the first time, he’s _really_ looking at her, and she’s not ready for how vulnerable, how bare it makes her feel.

“I know that look in your eyes,” he murmurs. “You’re not a monster.”

“How would you know?”

“I’m something of an expert on the subject,” he says, with a smile that lacks all humour. His hand slips from her cheek to trace the edge of her neck. “Clarke, you have no idea - “

“What?” she asks, when he breaks off. He closes his eyes and lets out a long, shuddering breath. Clarke watches his eyelashes tremble, entranced, and startles when his eyes fly open again with blazing determination.

She never does find out what Bellamy was going to say, because he pulls her in and slants their mouths together. Clarke’s shock passes in what feels like a single second, and then she’s kissing him back with a wild gasp, her hand flying up to tangle in the curls at the back of his head.

It’s not a gentle kiss - but then, they are not gentle people.

He groans when she bites his bottom lip and collapses back onto the cot, the elbow he was bracing himself on finally giving out. Clarke feels a brief moment of dismay when she thinks he’s pulling away for good, until she feels his hands grabbing at her hips, one pulling her closer by her belt loops, the other slipping under the hem of her shirt to smooth up her side.

“Come here,” Bellamy says roughly, the growl in his voice making goosebumps bloom all over Clarke’s skin. He braces her weight eagerly as she swings her leg over his hip and straddles his thighs. She leans forward to kiss him again and then he groans - in pain, this time. Clarke sits up immediately.

“Shit, your side,” she says, her hands hovering nervously over the wound she finished bandaging just moments ago. _Stupid_ of her to forget to be careful with him. She starts climbing off but Bellamy’s hands grab even more possessively at her hips, dragging her back into his lap. Clarke’s breath hitches as she feels a hard length against the inside of her thigh.

“Stay, please,” Bellamy says breathlessly. In the flickering light, his eyes look nearly black, unreadable. Only his voice gives him away.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Clarke stammers.

“I don’t care,” Bellamy says, sitting up with a wince that he tries to hide from her. He chases Clarke when she leans away, his arms wrapping around her back and holding her close. Clarke’s hands find his shoulders with the intention of pushing him back down to the mattress and making him rest, but then his mouth finds her neck and her common sense crumbles away.

“In my experience, as a - uh, as a - “ she says, stumbling over her protest even as she tilts her head to give Bellamy room as he leaves a trail of bruising kisses up the curve of her neck. It’s excessively difficult to keep her eyes open when he finds the spot under her jawbone that makes her whole body shudder in delight. She realizes only distantly that she’s rocking in his lap and making tiny gasping noises, that it should be embarrassing, but she can’t for the life of her remember why. “As a medical professional,” she tries again, “I really recommend - “

“ _Clarke_ ,” he interrupts, and he sounds so _fond_ that it startles her into shutting up. He kisses her again, wet and eager and just a little bit desperate. They break apart only briefly to unbutton her shirt as low as it goes, to unzip his pants. They’re still mostly clothed when the last of her patience slips away and she wraps her hand around the base of his cock and gives it a few experimental tugs. He feels warm and heavy and velvet-soft in her hand. Bellamy gets so quiet as she sinks down onto him that she thinks he doesn’t breathe at all until he’s bottomed out.

And strangely enough, as soon as he’s inside of her the urgency melts away. Part of it is Clarke still trying to be careful with the wound on his side, but Bellamy seems content to take his time too. His fingertips dig into her hips as he lifts her up slowly and slams her down, the push and pull making her head spin.

“You are - “ he says, reaching up to grab a fistful of her hair. His eyes are alight, his mouth almost a smile. “ _Magnificent_. Reckless, and infuriating, and - “ And just then, his fingers find her clit. Clarke is already close, after weeks in isolation before she was put into cryo, but the full force of Bellamy’s attention is too much to bear. Her mind goes white. Blinding. Blissful. She doesn’t hear him end that sentence.

When she opens her eyes again she is lying on her side next to him, her limbs still trembling with the aftershocks. Bellamy is stroking her arm very gently with one fingertip, and he looks more peaceful than Clarke has seen him yet. She tucks her hand under her chin and traces the features of his face.

“I didn’t know you could smile,” she says. He raises an eyebrow.

“Careful,” he says. “Or I’ll push you out of my sick bed.”

Clarke hits him with a pillow that disintegrates as it hits his face, kicking up a whirlwind of musty feathers. She’d be content to keep lying there with him, but he sits up with a groan just a moment later and starts cleaning up. The heavy warmth weighing her body down fades as she watches him move so stiffly.

“It hurt you, didn’t it?” she says. “Let me take a look.”

“It’s fine,” he says, handing her back her pants. “And it was worth it.”

Clarke stares at his retreating back as he pushes the desk she barricaded the door with aside and strolls out of the room. There’s no other word for it. He _strolls_. She fights not to grin as she dresses and finger-combs her hair into a semblance of neatness. It looks like she had an effect on Bellamy Blake, after all.

Dax’s body is already gone when she enters the hall, with only the wreckage of strewn barrels and a long smear of blood on the floor to assure her it wasn’t all a nightmare. Clarke curses as she feels the breeze from the open hatch at the top of the ladder. Idiot’s never going to let that wound scab over if he keeps pushing himself like this.

It’s still drizzling when she pokes her head outside, and the air is several degrees colder - or she’s still overheated from being with Bellamy. Clarke follows the trail of crushed stalks between the long, swaying grasses, and finds Bellamy standing at the top of a nearby gorge, already drenched from the rain again. He looks at her, a little apprehensive, as she comes to his side and looks over the edge.

Dax’s body lies splayed at the bottom, a lesson in gravity. Clarke can’t help but think the unnatural angle of his limbs is reminiscent of the bodies floated from the Ark. You weren’t supposed to see them - the Council would order the solar shutters close to that airlock shut before an execution - but sometimes someone was late to their post, or the body would hit the airlock door and spin out at an unexpected angle. Clarke only saw one or two, but it was enough to imprint the memory of the outstretched limbs, frozen in flight. Subtract the mud and the rocks he hit, and Dax could be one of those bodies out among the stars.

“Why did he want to kill us so badly?” Clarke asks, her voice small underneath the wide gray sky.

“You’re the easiest one to blame,” Bellamy replies quietly. He glances at her. “We never saw him,” he repeats. “If he followed us and tripped off a cliff, that’s his problem. We don’t know anything about it.”

Clarke does not answer. _In peace_ , she thinks, and struggles to finish the line. It feels like a lie. _In peace, may you leave this shore. In love, may you find the next._ Though she saw nothing of the two in him while they were down here. She reaches out and takes Bellamy’s hand, and they watch the mud soak Dax’s body until the rain is falling too hard to see through.

Clarke is sneezing by the time she and Bellamy return to the Skybox. Here and there between the trees surrounding the crash site, there are rough walls made from thin logs lashed together, a good start to the cabins they will need if winter is as bad as it is in the stories. There are no roofs yet, only rough tarps thrown over the slanted, clumsy walls, but Clarke already has some ideas. She’ll get to it in the morning - for now, it is late and she is tired… and still wet. The rain continued on the walk back in fits and starts, and none of her layers have had a chance to dry completely.

There’s a new tarp over the hollow where she and Miller and Monroe had bunked a few nights ago. Clarke pokes her head in and sees that there’s still an empty spot inside the makeshift tent, ostensibly for her. She strips off most of her wet layers, shivering a little in the evening’s cool, and wipes off the mud that has somehow found its way up her arms and legs. Monroe offers her a spare pair of overalls without her even asking, and Clarke feels a warm flicker of gratitude in her chest.

In the morning Miller wakes her accidentally as he’s getting up and Clarke stirs groggily, suddenly confronted with a throbbing headache and a dry soreness at the back of her throat that doesn’t bode well at all. Looks like there will be a price to pay for walking around in wet clothes for a day and a half. She groans vaguely at Miller when he asks if she’s coming to breakfast and pulls a threadbare blanket over her head to shield her eyes from the bright morning light.

What feels like mere seconds later, Bellamy is shaking her awake.

“Miller says you didn’t have any food,” he says, by way of greeting.

Clarke opens her mouth to ask him if shaking her awake is going to become an annoying trend, and manages only a hoarse croak. He blinks.

“You sound awful, princess.”

She flips him off and tries to retreat back under the blankets, only to find the ground fall away beneath her as she’s suddenly lifted into Bellamy’s arms. He grunts under her weight as he stands, and Clarke makes a croak of panic.

“Your wound,” she reminds him, her voice so hoarse and weak it’s not half as stern as she intends it to be.

“I’ll be fine,” he says, that familiar muscle in his jaw clenching. “You, however, aren’t going to get any rest with the delinquents stomping around, building cabins around you.” He ducks under the hanging flap of their tarp and Clarke flinches away from the bright morning light stabbing into her eyes.

“Put me down,” she says pathetically. The motion of Bellamy’s walk makes her stomach threaten to revolt. The fuck is he taking her?

“Just a sec,” he replies, branches and shards of sky flashing past his head. Clarke buries her face into his chest in an effort to fight her dizziness. He smells like sweat and greenery, an unexpectedly heady combination. Her cheeks burning as she hears delinquents murmuring as they pass by. At last he finally slows, hitching her higher into his arms with another grunt, and shuffles through the entrance of another tent. They both exhale in relief as he sets her down inside on a thin cot stripped from a cryo pod. “Rest,” he says, draping his jacket over her torso.

“Fuck off,” Clarke says around the pain in her throat, and she sees him smile before her eyelids droop.

Bellamy wakes her again sometime later, now with two metal tins in his hands.

“Sit up,” he instructs, crouching down next to her. Clarke carefully eases herself up and is pleased to feel her headache slightly retreated. “Monty found two flavours of tea and he wants to know which one you like better. We didn’t have time to dry them, but…” He shrugs and hands her the first tin. “This is chamomile. The other one is some kind of mint. Careful, the metal’s hot.”

It tastes more like boiled grass than any chamomile Clarke remembers from the Ark, but she knows she needs to stay hydrated, and the heat is soothing down her throat. Bellamy stomps back out, and Clarke takes the opportunity to look around as she takes small sips of tea. The jacket pooled around her waist and the gun holster hanging off a branch poking through a gap in two tarps tells her it’s Bellamy’s. It’s otherwise impersonal.

He returns a moment later with the carcass of a small bird. The first sniff Clarke takes through her congested nose smells delicious. The second immediately makes her nauseated, but Bellamy sits down on the other end of the cot and glares at her until she takes the bowl. The outside of the bird is a little charred and it’s half bones, but the meat is tender and Clarke alternates small bites with sips of tea.

“I’m thinking of going to check on another site on the map,” he says, absently digging a groove in the dirt floor with the heel of his boot. “Are you okay? If I leave?”

“Have I picked up on murderous tendencies from anyone else in the camp, you mean?” Clarke asks dryly. Bellamy gives her a look that suggests he doesn’t find it half as funny as she does. “It’s fine. Go.”

“I’ll bribe Raven into checking on you,” Bellamy says. He leans in, and for a startling moment Clarke thinks he’s going to kiss her goodbye. He tests the temperature of her forehead with the back of his hand instead, and she struggles to pretend she isn’t disappointed when he pulls away. She lies down and watches thoughtfully as he buckles the gun holster around his thigh and pats his pockets for her map. The memory of those thighs underneath hers hasn’t exactly had time to fade, but her body is exhausted, and somehow she’s asleep before she registers him leaving.

She wakes only in fits and starts for the next day and a half. Jasper and Monty pop in a few times, sometimes with food, sometimes with water, more often with questions on what to do with splinters and teenage grudges. They only talk in hushed whispers at first, glancing furtively around Bellamy’s tent as they do like it’s an exciting and forbidden place to be, but thankfully the novelty melts away after the first day. She doesn’t know what Bellamy told the camp about Dax, but they don’t bring up his absence at all.

When Bellamy finally returns on the second afternoon, Clarke is in the throes of a wave of chills. She opens her eyes at the crack of a twig underneath his step, and forces a smile as he crouches next to her and lays a gentle, hesitant hand on her shoulder. She’s shivering violently, even as sweat rolls off her skin, even curled into a tight ball beneath his jacket.

“Did you find anything?” Clarke asks between chattering teeth.

He shakes his head wordlessly and lies down at her back, warm and solid. With the chills chased away, Clarke manages to slip back into a restless sleep.

When she wakes again, her fever has finally broken and her head is clearer than it’s felt in two days. She rolls over to find Bellamy’s eyes wide open and staring up at the play of shadows against the tarp stretched over them. The only sign he makes that he knows she’s awake is to shift the arm propped under his head to make more room for her.

Clarke traces the profile of his face for a while, watching the twitch of his mouth, the tremble of his eyelashes when he blinks. It’s oddly comforting to have him here - or to be in his space, rather, though it’s not like it was her choice. Anything is better than the first night she spent out of cryosleep, alone and terrified of every unfamiliar sound in the forest outside the Skybox. She is starting to learn them now, and if Bellamy isn’t afraid, she isn’t either. She reaches out and strokes one finger down the inner crease of his elbow. His head lolls towards her, his eyebrows raised questioningly.

“What are you thinking?” she asks, pleased to find that her voice no longer sounds like rocks grating against each other.

Bellamy doesn’t answer immediately. Clarke sees her silhouette in his pupils, but she thinks he’s looking past her.

“Twenty seven years,” he murmurs at last, his voice cracking with pain on _years_ , and they don’t need to say anything further aloud.

As soon as Clarke is better, she starts joining Bellamy on day trips again, each small excursion taking them to another X on the map from Farm Station. Most of them are exercises in futility - sometimes they wander around the forest for hours looking for anything manmade or valuable or interesting enough to have been marked on the map and find nothing that fits the bill - and even when they do find something, it’s usually a pre-apocalypse wreck with only a few supplies left to scavenge.

In between their trips, the Skybox begins to take the shape of a home, the delinquents coming together to build lopsided little huts in the shadow of the broken station. Monty gives them a tour when the vegetable garden - with seeds scavenged from Farm Station - begins to bloom. Every little green shoot looks identical to Clarke, but Monty tells her there will be tomatoes and peppers and potatoes and cabbage and more - a cornucopia of food. They build a fence around the garden to shield it from grazing creatures and a smokehouse to keep the meat they are still not very good at catching and every single step forward feels like giving in.

Bellamy’s mood gets darker and darker, and Clarke suspects that’s the reason why - that every new structure in their camp is a declaration of surrender, that they’re not going to keep looking for the rest of the Ark. For his sister.

And it weighs on her too. More than once on one of their treks to the spots marked on the map, Clarke opens her mouth to say something. The muscles in her legs ache from all the walking, and the skin on her shoulders and cheekbones starts peeling from all the sun, and they’re constantly swatting obnoxiously buzzing insects away from their face, and it all seems so _pointless_. But then she remembers Bellamy’s voice cracking on _twenty seven years_ , and she can’t be the first to tell him that they should turn around and go home. That they should give in and acknowledge the Skybox as the closest thing they even have to a home.

The day they find Factory Station is as bright and beautiful as all others before it, and Clarke wakes to birdsong and the clatter of dishes as delinquents slowly pour out of their new cabins and start making breakfast together. Miller and Monroe are both gone when she gets out of bed, Miller’s bed as perfectly made as can be when bed is a worn mat and a salvaged blanket, and Monroe’s a rumpled pile. Clarke wanders out to the breakfast preparations and helps herself to some apple slices and two comically small fried eggs. Across the campfire from her, she notices Jasper dipping his slices into the yolk and tries it herself, a little suspiciously.

“The hell are you doing?” Bellamy asks her as she pops a yolk-drenched apple slice into her mouth. She chews and glares up at him as he walks around her stump, hands on his hips.

“In my defense,” Clarke murmurs and she nods her head towards Jasper.

“Right,” Bellamy says dryly, following her line of sight and shaking his head. “Are you ready to go? We’re already late.”

It’s true that they’re usually out of the camp before the majority of the delinquents wake on the days they go looking for the rest of the Ark, but it’s not like anyone’s really paying attention to them, and she tells Bellamy as much.

Five minutes later, Harper and Miller notice them slipping out of camp and hurry to intercept.

“You said it’s dangerous out there! You told us not to go out alone!” Harper says, scolding Bellamy as though he’s not five years older and a head taller than her. It makes Clarke smile to see him freeze in his tracks. He gives her a look out of the side of his eye that is very clearly asking her to reconsider her claim that their departure wouldn’t be noticed.

“I’m not alone,” Bellamy replies. “I have Clarke.”

“No offense to Clarke,” Miller says, and then, as though delivering a secret leans in and says, “You’re like the most competent person I know - but that’s still only two of you. And we definitely don’t want you to disappear like Dax did.”

Clarke’s humour vanishes like a wisp of smoke swept away by wind. A trickle of guilt and unease creeps down her spine and she forces herself not to shudder right in front of him. Bellamy’s face remains almost completely unreadable, only the tiniest twitch in his jaw betraying him. He glances back at Clarke.

“Should we tell them?” he asks, and Clarke’s knees nearly buckle from underneath her in horror. Unbidden, her mind replays the sound Dax made when he hit the floor, how small his body looked splayed in the mud at the bottom of the gorge, Bellamy promising her no one had to know. She feels a hot surge of anger - not at him but at herself for _believing_ \- “About the map?” he adds, and Clarke has to turn away as the relief overwhelms her.

“Yes,” she says in a strangled voice, bracing her palms against her knees and breathing in deeply. “Sure, whatever.”

Clarke shakes off Harper’s concern and strides into the forest determinedly, her thumbs hooked into the loops of her backpack. She catches only brief snatches of the others’ conversation as they follow in her wake. It’s mostly Bellamy and Harper musing on the next stages of their building projects, with an occasional grunt from Miller that could be either approval or disapproval of their ideas. Clarke has opinions, and would jump at the chance to discuss them any other day, but even as the day grows hotter and she has to tie her sweat-drenched cardigan around her waist, a stubborn chill lingers in her flesh.

Even dead, she can’t escape Dax.

They’re not even really looking, when they find Factory Station. Clarke has her eyes trained on the break in the trees up ahead, where this forested hill they’ve been climbing up for half an hour finally peaks in golden sunlight, and Bellamy is just behind her saying they should stop for lunch soon, and then -

They reach the top and Clarke realizes suddenly that it is not a hill but a cliff with a dizzying drop. Sunlight glints at the bottom of the cliff, blindingly bright, and Clarke raises an arm to shield her eyes as the others gasp at her side. Her heart sinks as her eyes adjust enough to make out the jagged metal shapes catching the light at the bottom of the drop. It’s unmistakably another station.

Of course, Bellamy throws himself forward before any of them can think to grab him. Clarke’s yell dies in her throat when Bellamy changes his trajectory at the last moment and starts running along the edge of the crumbling cliff instead of directly at it. She follows without thinking, her feet tracing his footsteps in the chalky rock as her mind slowly catches on to the stupidity. She opens her mouth to call Bellamy back and finally sees what he must have seen - a scar in a more sloping part of the cliff where they might be able to climb down.

“It’s not safe,” Bellamy tells them when she catches up, panting. “You don’t have to come.”

“If it’s safe enough for you to go down, it’s safe enough for me to come down,” Clarke says stubbornly, and she watches him hesitate, assessing the path again.

Harper, ever sensible, says “We could at least look for like, a vine,” and turns her head this way and that scanning the bush at the edge of the cliff, but even she doesn’t sound convinced - and besides, Bellamy is already climbing down, his hands clutching at exposed roots for balance. A terribly callous part of Clarke whispers that the station has waited at the base of the cliff for twenty seven years already, and can surely afford a few hours more while they find a safer way down, but then she thinks of the broken cryo pods and Wells’ grinning skeleton and wordlessly starts after Bellamy. Pebbles skitter out from underneath her, and she hears them clink against the face of the cliff for far longer than she’d like.

Their descent is slow and careful, feeling one foothold out at a time, Bellamy pointing out rocks and roots to Clarke from below and Clarke relaying the advice up to Harper and Miller like they are links in one foolhardy chain. It was clever of him to pick the vertical scar, as it affords them a little bit of protection from the wind and the sensation of being terribly exposed to the drop, and two extra directions to brace themselves on. Nevertheless, Clarke’s fingertips are scraped raw and aching by the time her feet touch solid ground again, and her shin throbs where she slipped and banged it against a jutting stone.

Even Harper, who has the best biceps of all the delinquents save Bellamy, has to stop and crouch when they reach the bottom, her head hanging between her knees and her panting audible from where Clarke is. If Bellamy is exhausted too, he certainly doesn’t show it, running off towards the wrecked mass of the station pretty much the instant his feet touch horizontal ground. Clarke’s arms feel like actual noodles and she’s feeling the onset of a distinct dehydration headache and the _last_ thing she wants to do is run after Bellamy.

Clarke sighs.

And she runs after Bellamy.

She finds him hesitating at the mouth of a shattered airlock. Clarke does not want to think about how hard the station must have hit the ground to shatter glass that withstood over a century of the vacuum of space.

“This was Factory Station,” he tells her flatly, pointing to the faded Russian flag printed on the wall of the airlock, the block letters MIR-3 nearly unreadable under a thin layer of lichen. Clarke worries her bottom lip with her teeth a little harder than she means to and tastes blood. Bellamy’s eyes are wide and a little feral, a sharp contrast to the forced calm of his voice, and in the face of his impending grief she feels graceless.

“Do you - “ she falters, staring into the silent darkness beyond the airlock. “Do you want me here?”

He is silent and still for a moment. Clarke’s scrapped fingers tap an anxious rhythm against the side of her thigh.

“Yes,” he says, and then he ducks his head to step through the shattered airlock door. Inside, Factory Station is somehow darker and less welcoming than Farm Station was, the air simultaneously cool and heavy, but Bellamy looks up and down the corridor in both directions and heads confidently left. Behind them, Clarke can distantly hear Miller murmuring to Harper. She’s more worried about the way Bellamy is tracing his hands along the rusted and moss-covered walls, the way he’ll stop when they reach an intersection in the hallways and find a corridor blocked with rubble.

She thinks Factory Station hit the cliff first and then ricocheted to its resting place here, an extra impact that would have had violent repercussions on its human cargo. Her heart sinks lower with every additional residential block that has been absolutely crushed, and Bellamy’s already frantic pace worsens as he searches the corridors. Here and there the hull has been completely torn away and sunlight pours through the gaps into the tomb of the station, illuminating dandelions and wildflowers that are valiantly growing in the cracks between floor panels and reaching, yearning, for the light. Clarke keeps expecting to turn a corner and see a pile of skeletons still clutching each other for their final journey to the ground, and it is almost worse that they find nothing and no one.

By the time Bellamy stops, the silence has grown so loud that Clarke’s ears are faintly ringing with her efforts to pick something, anything out that isn’t their footsteps, their breathing.

“This was my apartment,” he says, and she wordlessly helps him pry the long-dead pneumatic doors apart. Inside it is even smaller and sadder than the apartments Clarke saw in Farm Station, to say nothing of the one she grew up in. There is a two-bed bunk and an overturned table and a built-in wardrobe whose drawers hang listlessly open, moth-eaten clothing and sewing supplies spilling haphazardly over the rims. And then, when Bellamy kicks the table out of the way and lifts a nearly invisible hinge up, there is the hole in the floor that seems to suck all the air out of the room. “It’s so small,” Bellamy murmurs to himself, staring down at the compartment. “Was she really that small?”

Clarke is torn between backing out into the hallway and leaving him to the memories she is such a garish stranger to, and reaching out.

She chooses the latter, stepping closer and raising her hand. She means only to rub his shoulder in comfort, but Bellamy turns and all but folds himself into her embrace, his face burying in the crook of her neck.

“I’m sorry,” she says awkwardly, and they sway a little together before they get their balance. She can feel Bellamy shaking very slightly against her and hums quietly, a half-remembered lullaby. When at last he pulls away, she is surprised to see his face dry.

“She’s not here,” he says, in the same flat, false voice he used earlier. “No one is. This was another waste of time.”

His shoulders are straight and steady as he strides back out of the station, no trace of the guilt-wracked boy who reached for her just moments ago.

“Hold on,” Clarke says, hurrying to keep pace. “We should at least look around, maybe there will be another map, or some other hint where our people are - “

They burst out into sunlight and it is momentarily blinding after the darkness inside Factory. Clarke grabs Bellamy’s elbow and uses him for navigation as she blinks away the bright spots on her vision.

“Guys?” Harper calls out uncertainly. Clarke squints against the sun and spots her crouching in the swaying grasses several paces away from the strewn debris of the station. Miller stands guard over her, looking distinctly ashen.

“Watch your step,” Miller tells them as they approach. The warning turns out to be necessary, because underneath the gentle sway of grass the ground is strangely bumpy, and there are chunks of rock the size of her head just waiting to catch someone’s ankle.

“Shoulder-width apart, and each row is about six feet wide,” Harper says, her hand reaching out to trace one of the rocks.

“What?” Bellamy asks.

Harper looks up and smiles a sad, sweet smile.

“It’s a graveyard,” she says. Clarke doesn’t understand at first. When it clicks, she feels a wave of nausea roll through her. Harper’s right. The rocks are arranged in neat rows, each spaced wide enough for a body. Each bump beneath the grass is a grave, and they are standing on the remains of their people, twenty seven years too late.

There are a _lot_ of graves.

“Do you see?” Harper presses, when no one can bring themselves to say anything. “Someone survived. Someone buried them.”

“Then where the hell did they go?” Bellamy asks, and not one of them can answer that. And even though they are standing in full, blazing sunlight, Clarke still shivers.

  
  


Several nights later Clarke is sitting cross-legged on the cot in Bellamy’s tent - he still hasn’t made himself a cabin, and she’ll have to force him into one by winter but for now she likes the play of the nearest campfires flickering playfully against the tarp - and rubs at her eyes in frustration as she and Bellamy haggle over the chore schedule for the next few days, because, irritatingly enough, a camp full of teenagers will not come together and cooperate so they can devote their full time to looking for their people.

“Pascal can’t avoid kitchen duty forever. He keeps getting out of stuff by saying he has heatstroke, but he doesn’t even know what symptoms to fake,” she says at the tail end of a rant she doesn’t think Bellamy is actually paying attention to anymore, even though he is nodding at all the right places as he idly flips through a worn novel they found in one of the bunkers. To test this theory Clarke grabs a twig from the foot of the cot and throws it.

“Hey,” he says mildly as it bounces off his chest and onto the open pages. “Chill out, Griffin. They’re just kids.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Clarke admits, frowning like it’s something particularly distasteful to say aloud. “You were actually listening?”

“Not the last part, no, I got the gist and you kept circling the same points,.” he says.

“ _Ugh_ ,” Clarke groans, grasping blindly for something else to throw at him - twigs, or a pinecone, _anything_ \- but he’s swept the ground in his tent pretty well to avoid things digging into his back beneath the thin cot. At last he closes his book and looks at her evenly for long enough that Clarke starts to itch under the weight of his gaze. “ _What_ ,” she grouses. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“You’re the one who invited yourself into my tent and started complaining,” he points out, the faintest of smiles tugging at the corner of his mouth. After Factory Station, it’s good to see him smiling a little again, even if it is tired and subtle. “Is it helping?”

“No, not really,” Clarke says, but that is not entirely true. She sticks her tongue out at him. He looks pensive, his mouth soft as he continues to watch her.

“You know,” he begins, careful. “There are other, proven methods of stress relief.”

Clarke’s cheeks flush without her permission and goosebumps appear on her arms despite the warm evening air.

“Bellamy - “

“You can say no,” he says quickly. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“And if I say yes?”

“Well,” he says, fingering the cracked spine of his novel, the only hint that he might be nervous too. “I have heard I am quite talented.” When she grins, he shifts to the edge of the cot and pats the spot next to him. Clarke crawls up and lays her head on his balled-up jacket. He traces the outline of her ribcage with one trailing finger that makes Clarke shudder.

“Are you going to do anything, or just tickle me?” she challenges.

“It’s called foreplay, Griffin,” Bellamy complains.

“Tickling me is not foreplay - “ she tries to say, before he shuts her up with a bold kiss.

“It might help you to relieve stress if you try to enjoy yourself instead of just critiquing me,” he says when he pulls away. Then he pauses, thoughtful. “Actually, you’re such a pain in the ass that might work for you. Is it working for you, princess?”

“It’s really not.” She flicks his ear, hard, and he ducks away and presses his cheek to her stomach as he laughs. She can feel his ribcage shaking with muffled laughter between her legs.

When he sits up and strokes his hand over her denim-clad thigh, his eyes are dark, but the faint smile still lingering in the set of his mouth puts her at ease.

“I’ll make it good,” he promises her, low and dark as his thumb traces small circles higher and higher up her thigh. When he reaches the seam below her zipper Clarke cannot help but shiver.

“I’m a skeptic,” she warns him as she lifts her hips and he eases her jeans off. And then his mouth is on her, searingly warm, and Clarke feels every burden she’s been carrying melt away in a single, stuttering exhale. Her hands grasp blindly for Bellamy until she has a fistful of his beautiful curls running between her fingers. He makes a pleased sound against her when she involuntarily pulls and she tries it again, deliberate this time. The world narrows to the point of contact between them and the tight coil of anticipation building inside her.

She is so close, shaking under his tongue and gasping for relief, when they hear the voices. Bellamy freezes and Clarke’s eyes snap open. Two shadowy silhouettes, illuminated by the distant campfire, dance on the tent wall.

“I would _kill_ for some toothpaste,” the first is saying.

“The apples seem pretty good for cleaning your teeth,” the other delinquent says. They are meandering past Bellamy’s tent in no apparent hurry and Clarke puts the side of her hand in her mouth and bites it to avoid groaning out loud as her impending orgasm dissipates like smoke in the wind. “Like, biting into one?”

“I knoooow. But _toothpaste_. And deodorant. We are surrounded by so many teenage boys and they are not throwing themselves into the river _nearly_ enough.”

“Can you be quiet for me, Clarke?” Bellamy asks, barely above a whisper, still close enough she can feel the spill of his breath against her flushed skin.

She nods so frantically it makes him laugh again, and then the unwelcome voices are fading out again and his mouth is back where she needs it.

Clarke does not entirely manage to keep her promise. She does moan when she finally tips over the edge, and she lays limp and boneless on his cot as he crawls back up and stretches along her body. She only stirs when she feels him brush a sweaty lock of hair off her cheek. The smug grin he’s giving her when she opens her eyes was not worth coming back to reality for.

“You look relaxed,” he says, and Clarke pushes his face away with her entire palm. She is warm and drowsy and she cannot entirely hide her smile. It seems only natural to her to reach for Bellamy’s belt buckle.

His hand is gentle around her wrists.

“You don’t - I wasn’t expecting anything in return,” he says, and he sounds like he means it. Clarke kisses his chin sloppily.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “This isn’t altruistic. I want to.”

Afterwards, remembering how quickly Bellamy had gotten dressed last time, Clarke slips out from underneath his outstretched arm and starts hunting for her clothes. To her chagrin there is still a pleasant languidness lingering in her limbs, a soft-edged clarity that wasn’t there before. He really did take a burden off her.

“Where are you going?” Bellamy asks drowsily.

“To… my cabin?” Clarke asks. “Where I live?”

“Hmm,” he says, closing his eyes and laying his head back down in the crook of his elbow. She thinks that’s the last of it, but without opening his eyes again, he says, “You could stay here.” Before she can think to answer, he quickly adds. “I mean, I know I don’t have real walls yet, so I understand if you want a proper cabin, but. You already spend so much time here annoying me.”

“And you want more?”

“You’re growing on me,” he says grudgingly, cracking one eye open to stare at her.

“All right,” Clarke says, and she sets her boots back down and crawls back under the thin, holey sheet with him.

“That’s it?” he asks.

“Yeah? Well, what did you want?”

“I expected you to argue. Everything’s a fight with you.”

“I don’t start fights,” Clarke replies. “Other people start them with the person they think I am.”

He hums thoughtfully and shifts on the cot so he’s looking up at the ceiling. For a while there is only the sound of distant conversation from elsewhere in the camp and the quiet sound of moths repeatedly flying headfirst into the tarp.

“You’re a good co-leader, I think,” he says at last. “I’m… glad that you’re here.”

“I’m gonna annoy you with chore schedules first thing in the morning,” Clarke says, scooting closer and resting her cheek against his bicep.

“Can’t wait,” Bellamy says dryly.

"I'm glad you're here too," Clarke whispers, and in the darkness, he turns his head and presses his mouth to the crown of her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I know this one's a little niche as far as premises ago, so I appreciate everyone who's given it a chance.
> 
> If you like this story, you'll probably like another canon-divergent story I'm writing called in grief, Demeter circles the earth, which I plan on updating next! You can find me on tumblr as [kindclaws](https://kindclaws.tumblr.com/)

**Author's Note:**

> The math Raven does near the start re: the pieces of the Ark and terminal velocity and stuff, that’s uh, that’s super sketchy. The average skydiver has a range of like 200-400kmph, and I didn’t want to start estimating the drag of a chunk of space station so I just chose 300kmph for funsies, and assuming a disgustingly simplified trajectory with 34 seconds delay between the pieces breaking off, that’s only actually like 3km? So like, 28km squared of forest to search for the other half of the Skybox, which seems vaguely doable on foot? Anyway I didn’t like those numbers so I didn’t dwell on them too long and neither should you! Plot > math.
> 
> There's another universe where I decided to go the 'yes grounder' route with this fic, because I was sorely tempted by driving in the impact of 27 missing years by having them meet middle-aged Lexa, but I decided against it because I don't like grounders and other reasons that you'll probably be able to pick up on in the next chapter. Also, it's spookier this way!
> 
> I'm on tumblr as kindclaws. Thanks for reading.


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